Five Launch Lessons

[image error]

Over the years, I've learned to enjoy NaNoWriMo site relaunches the way a winemaker might savor a fine vintage. It's such a heady mix of flavors! There's the bouquet of excitement, a slight grace note of terror, all undercut with a peppery finish of ripening HTML code.

This is the second year where I've had the pleasure of watching relaunch from a distance, as the great NaNoWriMo Program Director Lindsey Grant worked with fearless tech lead Dan Duvall to oversee everything. Not being as directly involved in the process has given me a chance to reflect on all the lessons I've learned from site relaunches of years past. I would like to share some of those lessons with you now.

1) You will always wish you had one more week than you do. 

2) At some point, you will discover you forgot to build or transport over some vital piece of the website. This happens because even simple websites are more complicated than most of us would dream, and because the folks working on the sites have usually been awake for three days straight and are likely hallucinating large talking owls as they try to index database tables and do other important things.   

3) Crazy, insurmountable problems will arise in the homestretch. Databases will fail. Files will corrupt themselves. Some complete show-stopper of a drama will rise up out of nowhere, and you will cry for a while, then stop crying and find a way around it. The show must go on, and it always does.

4) At some point, you will confront the fact that you still have some bugs in the site, and you're going to launch with them. This year, we had an incredible beta testing team that included Rob Diaz, Cylithria Dubois, Heather Dudley, Emily Bristow, Cybele May, and over 500 volunteer debuggers. Everyone worked their hearts out feeding bug reports back to four Ruby on Rails programmers, who then dove in and made things right. That's about 500 more testers and three more programmers than we've had in the past. We still launched knowing we would need to wake up early and fix bugs the next day.

5) The five-day period after a website launch is one of the most satisfying times in all of human history. You're fixing the bugs you knew were there and learning about new ones from participants and fixing those too. You're finalizing and deploying the features that you didn't finish in the rush to launch. You're responding to requests from participants and tweaking and adding helpful text to make the site more understandable. Thanks to the feedback from the folks using it, the site takes shape immediately after launch almost as much as it does immediately before it. And the talking owl hallucinations abate somewhat. That's a nice thing too.

Happy site re-launch, everyone!

-Chris B.

Photo of the Office of Letters and Light on NaNoWriMo launch eve, 2011