Stress==insomnia
Monday, December 5th, 2005
Oh man. Ever been so nervous and excited at the same time that you didn’t sleep? That was me last night. A couple of great guys, Dennis and Markus, joined the BSQ Sitestats team as translators, and yesterday, we made the big push for the 1.6.0 release.
It’s really amazing how much code BSQ Sitestats has become, which makes it a big nightmare for testing. It turns out that Markus and Dennis are excellent testers, translators, and developers. They saved my sanity yesterday by testing every time I’d COMMIT code to the SVN repository. I’ve never actually seen BSQ Sitestats in Dutch or German, but I bet it looks good 
I got the release out at 9 PM last night, which is 4 AM for you central Europeans. By the time I tried to go to bed at 12:30 AM, the release notes were already posted on the Russian and German portals, and hits were streaming in to the demo site. Nice!
Any of you guys who develop software (especially career software developers) know about the nervousness that goes along with a release. The only real cure for that is time. At 50 downloads an hour, time was not on my side. Honestly, I was expecting to wake up this morning to 30 bug reports about some showstopper that everyone had.
This morning wasn’t that bad, actually. Diligent Markus had found a bug or two, but it wasn’t anything that required an immediate re-release. I found a couple bugs after work that turned out to be nuances with PHP and include files. I figured it would be another 2-3 weeks until my next feature release, so I might as well get a bug-fix release out there right away.
Tonights been relaxing. I watched Star Trek II after work while trying to stay warm in the apartment. It’s 6 degrees F outside, so the floor of the apartment is 10 degrees cooler no matter what. I think I’ll finish up the night with some Battlefield 1942 and perhaps another movie.
Expect a graphing module in a couple days. I love the suspense