Alexander Beletsky's development blog

My profession is engineering

The best day in developer's life

What would you think is best day in developers life? First day of work, last one? Salary or bonuses payment day? All of those are pretty nice, indeed. But I think best day in developers life is day of Release. It is exactly the time than the code you created recently is being pushed out to production and customers are able to see what changes you’ve done so far. Release makes a really good feeling of “work is done”. In reality, of cause, work is not stopped but only begins after release date - production issues, customer reports, change requests.. all of these still need to be handled.

Releasing a product is big job. And it is not all about coding. First of all it is well coordinated effort of all groups - Development, QA, Documentation, Product Owners, Stakeholders etc. I’ve seen situations than products that could be potentially released just stuck on a line, because of lack of coordination. Here the team atmosphere plays important role. If team sees the goal, agreed on method and tools and communicated well it is a big step to success.

Yesterday, Report Designer product that is part of E-conomic has been released. It took about an year to make this happen. Huge amount of work were done, many lessons learned. We’ve passed long way from Specification till Integration code to main branch. I personally that it was just too long. With current experience I see a lot of value in frequent releases, so I tend to just-in-time production practices as Kanban. I world of web products, feedback is extremely fast and cost of defect is not so high, comparing to desktop.

It is good time to exhale, inhale fresh air and self-motivate for next interesting projects. We are now looking forward to make a better codebase, better processes and better products as result. Let’s start new adventure!