24
Jun
2009
 

Launching: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

by Fraser Hess

This is the first in a short series on my adventures getting my software out the door. Rather than this first lesson be a lesson in what to do, here’s what not to do.

Don’t order a DSL upgrade 7 days before your ship date.

Yes, indeed. Last Wednesday morning, Qwest “upgraded” our DSL to 7Mbps. From then until Saturday lunchtime, I had 13 hours of solid connectivity, most of which I was asleep for. It did indeed get resolved and I am enjoying the new speed but it certainly wasn’t worth stress of trying to find connectivity while trying to ship. I went to Barnes and Noble, Krispy Kreme and the seminary library in search of the uplink. I also wasted a trip to Best Buy to get a new DSL modem which didn’t solve the issue, despite the Qwest tech’s assurances that it would. (That reminds me, I need to return it and get my $75 back.)

Thinking about it, my rule should be generalized as:

Don’t replace/upgrade/otherwise mess with any of your critical infrastructure within two weeks of your ship date unless it’s broke.

After being burned by the DSL outage, I left well alone newly released updates to XCode, PHP, Safari and Java. I’ll get to those at a less critical moment.

Well, lesson learned. I won’t be doing that again. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna download a movie from Netflix.