I just want to tag this day like you would git tag your project. I liked my job today, I felt contributing actively and positively working with very different kind of people like journalists, designers and dba. It was fun.
The day started with a terribly blocking bug to solve and continued with campaigning to other developers to get them to review my 176 files pull request. It is hard duty because you need to chase them so much they flee from you at all cost, but once you capture one you need to be nice. As for the blocking bug, fortunately once you think hard enough anything can be solved. Solving it unblocked us for our big goal of the day.
Today the big goal was to release our MVP and we were really close to the goal by 6:00pm. Everyone was ready, the journalists had created with big pride their big ordered list of articles they had written and were ready to publish. And then, when they finally published. CA-TA-STRO-PHE. “Oh my god, what is that?!!” “What?!” “He completely screwed up my articles !!!” “Why did he do that??!” “What the…” “Where is all the content??!!” “Oh no. I need to reorder them all?!” “Grumphhh”
During the panic time I was there hiding behind my screen, silently listening to their totally in shock comments. Then, I got up and said “Uh… have you been editing your articles simultaneously?” “Yes, why?” “…I see… it is not yet a handled situation…(ta-daa!)” I said. “Oh no, #AgonyOfTheBeing” I could decrypt from their faces. It was indeed something my app didn’t yet handle but they were already warned, it is MVP after all not PPP (production polished product).
And it was no big deal to reorder the articles, it was just drag and dropping a few things around! But the journalists found it was like the agony of agony, they were exaggerating everything, well a bit like journalists actually. The content had not disappeared, it just needed a little reorganization. I didn’t show it so much but I was really laughing inside. They had finished their big prize piece of work and then suddenly “He” (the evil guy who lives in the web server) screwed everything up like a bad kid. “Why would he do that?” they kept asking full of confusion.
In the end, they recovered everything in 15mn. Way to dramatize.
Anyway it all ended happily. The MVP was released. “He” became nice, and actually has always been ! That said, working with journalists is very funny, I like them. They give a good purpose to what I do and make me see things differently. Good day.
