That last release was a killer

Yes, making the previous release successful was really stressful. It was the first time that we put in so much into a release, but it was all worth it. We included a lot of functionality and tinkered with almost every page ( both frontend and backend ) to accommodate the enhancements. We have faced this situation before, almost everything that runs picture perfect on our local machines fails miserably on our servers. Given the kind of experience the team brings into the project, its almost certain that we would have tried something new each and every time, some optimization or a tweak, which by default will fail upon releasing. This time around it was an effort to strike a balance between innovation and finishing up on our work, coz we couldn’t compromise innovation nor could we afford to look clueless when things failed on our servers. We had to write efficient code as we knew  there would be no time for testing or second thoughts.  We had absolutely no time to integrate our respective modules and test them out as a whole, thats the reason our release ran into a lot of problems post deployment. We thank all those people who gave us bug reports and exposed some critical errors that we should have spotted ourselves.
There were some interesting incidents during the course of developing this release. For starters, the entire length of this release the team never met, all meetings were online, discussions and brain storming on the phone. This release is a testament to Virtual Teams that collaborate over the internet and work productively. The entire discussions module was developed in a cab by Prateeksha on her lappie whilst being driven to and from office, that was the only time she could find to work on Samparkh.  This was as unprepared we could go into a release, I remember how meticulously we used to test things out before the big day. It was a different story this time around and we have our reasons for it ;-).

We would like to dedicate this release to Dr Umashankar, Prateeksha’s uncle. Despite being a quadriplegic, he achieved a lot and was the source of inspiration to many people who had lost hope in life.  He  was the president of  Mobility India , an organization that helps physically challenged people in India. We have created a subset in fond remembrance of Dr Umashankar. Please do use it to share other inspirational stories or write about people who influenced you in some way.
Ritesh