I’ve not been able to blog much since we got back from New York as work has been ever so busy, even over the weekend, as we tried again to put our software release live. In order to give the best service as possible to our users we agreed to do our release at the weekend – much better for them as there’s no downtime or impact during the week. Unfortunately, a number of other IT teams had the same idea and used the weekend to do various maintenance tasks on servers etc which hampered our progress; it took us two days to get the release done instead of just one. But, we finally did it – at the end of Sunday we declared ourselves as live.
Monday wasn’t so great, though. After working at the same place for six years, I’ve only had to take a car home due to late working once and that was a couple of weeks ago. I’ve now done it twice. Due to a completely unforeseen set of circumstances that didn’t come up in any of our testing our data warehouse batch stopped dead on Monday morning. After a few hurried conversations, a bug fix and careful retesting we finally got it going again by Monday evening. By a quarter past midnight I was finally happy that things had worked and had arranged for someone in Australia to watch over the next batch process that kicked off a couple of hours later. Thanks to Simon the friendly cab driver I finally made it home just after one in the morning, feeling a little worse for wear.
Monday wasn’t so great, though. After working at the same place for six years, I’ve only had to take a car home due to late working once and that was a couple of weeks ago. I’ve now done it twice. Due to a completely unforeseen set of circumstances that didn’t come up in any of our testing our data warehouse batch stopped dead on Monday morning. After a few hurried conversations, a bug fix and careful retesting we finally got it going again by Monday evening. By a quarter past midnight I was finally happy that things had worked and had arranged for someone in Australia to watch over the next batch process that kicked off a couple of hours later. Thanks to Simon the friendly cab driver I finally made it home just after one in the morning, feeling a little worse for wear.
With any new system there is going to be teething problems, so all of this wasn’t entirely unexpected. However, now that we’ve got all of our scheduled releases out of the way I’m hoping that we’ll have no more major issues like these for a while. We’ll see – fingers crossed!
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