Wednesday, 24 December 2003

Personal , Tech

Twenty-four

[24]

My front door took on a particular resonance as I closed it behind me this morning. Strange how I'd not made the link before.

I'm at work, as I have been every Christmas Eve for years. I love working Christmas Eve; there's a willingness to co-operate that's not so visible other days of the year.

Four years ago, I worked until eight in the evening. One of the teams here had developed software for a service that had recently been launched. But in the preceding weeks - as more and more people logged on - the software kept failing, kept falling over. We knew how many of the computers had been sold; we knew how many had been used. The two figures didn't match by a long shot. We realised there were a lot of them sitting wrapped under Christmas trees up and down the country.

So two of us were drafted in on Christmas Eve to try and figure out how to make sure these presents worked come Christmas Day. And it was one of those moments when The System worked: we drew diagrams with big, colourful, arcing lines on white-boards; scraps of paper with fragments of code were expanded into functioning programs; cans of Coke were delivered to desks by worried management.

In the end, it worked. In twelve hours we'd rewritten two months of work, deployed it and seen it cope with greater loads than the old code. And I drove home along clear roads feeling a sense of accomplishment I'd not expected when I drove to work that morning.

Posted by pab at 09:33