No More Big Bang Releases
I have career-long struggles with many things, and deadlines and big bang releases definitely make an appearance in my top 100.
This struggle started probably around 12 years ago at Cloud9 IDE (well before its AWS acquisition). It was my first time working on “serious,” non-hobby, non-academic software. And it was the first job where I had somehow navigated myself into a management role. We had a lot of VC money in the bank; the inventor of JavaScript on our advisory board; and the ambition to change the (software development) world. What could possibly go wrong?
We were ramping towards a huge release. Cloud9 IDE 2.0, which would revolutionize software development forever. We were building a browser-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) in the cloud, y’all! An amazing code editor implemented in JavaScript. Real-time collaborative code editing. Isolated cloud-hosted runtime environments (this was way before mainstream container technology).
A launch date was set. The tech press had received private demos of what we were going to ship; they had articles ready to publish.
