Relief. Quiet pride. A team that pulled off something genuinely hard, and a launch boring enough to celebrate.

We launched. And it was, mercifully, kind of boring.

Trust me when I say boring is the best possible outcome a software launch can have. We got the final go-ahead about half an hour before our planned cutoff. When the time came we threw a switch, and that was that. The new platform is live in the San Carlos lab.

There were issues, of course, but they were all quality-of-life things. This thing could be logged better. This metric could give us more insight. This print feature could be worded more clearly. That action is going to happen more often here at the beginning, so we should streamline it. Every one of them was a chance to practice our hot-fix process and get a patch out quickly, not a fire we had to fight. Work never stopped. Nobody panicked.

We provided twenty-four-hour in-person coverage in the lab, working in eight-hour shifts and taking turns on the overnight slot. My shift was as uneventful as the rest, and I got to share it with our Director, my boss’s boss, the person between us and the company executives. Being in the trenches at three in the morning with the person who most directly controls this next stage of my career (besides me, of course) was a gift. You can’t buy that kind of context.

It was a long week and a tiring one, but also a cause for celebration. We were in just one lab, in just one workflow, but the team pioneered a whole new way of writing and deploying software inside a massive company. The vast majority of this work happened before I ever arrived. I’ve been here two months. The launch validated a whole pipeline of work still to come and put real pressure on a status quo that protects billions of dollars of business. I’m riding on my team’s coattails, no question. I also know I applied every bit of my skills and experience to the work that needed doing in these last couple of months to help get us across the finish line. It’s exciting and a little scary, and it cements that I made the right decision coming here.

Read

So much Datadog documentation. I had basic metrics hooked up already, but seeing with my own eyes what real production users were doing gave me all sorts of ideas for improving observability. A month ago Datadog was brand new to me. I’m still not a Double-D expert, but I’m getting there as quickly as I can.

I read more of Starter Villain on the plane, but honestly it was hard to focus on fiction this week. I’m about halfway through and still loving it.

Played

We got in a great Gloomhaven session before I flew out. There’s a lot of upcoming travel for folks in my group, so it may be a month or more before we get back to it.

Cooked

No time for cooking, but we did have one great group meal the night before launch. Dry ramen, which I’d never had before. The noodles and toppings are served separately from the broth, and you dunk each individual bite into the broth as you eat it. Making it through the meal was a laborious process and absolutely worth every minute.

Noticed

Monday was a slow workday. Most of my team was still traveling during the day ahead of the evening’s launch. They didn’t have as far to come as I did, so I’d flown up on Sunday. On top of that, the building holding our lab had a planned power outage for most of the day, so we weren’t allowed to work there even if we’d wanted to.

I decided to go see the place responsible for my love of computers: Apple, Inc. headquarters. I was in San Carlos and Apple is in Cupertino, about twenty miles south down the peninsula. Despite a sore and swollen knee from being curled up against the bulkhead for five hours the day before, I made my way from the hotel to the commuter rail to a bus to the Apple Park Visitor Center.

I was eager to see The Ring, the beautiful circular building that was Steve Jobs’s final project, with my own eyes. And in that I was disappointed, but in a very interesting way. The visitor center is directly across the street and there’s a rooftop observation deck, but even from up there you can barely catch a few little glimpses of glass and steel through the treetops. The campus is essentially surrounded by forest and clever landscape grading, so that even as I later walked a couple of miles around the building — at times less than a hundred feet from it — I could never actually see it. I’d never seen that aspect of the campus described before, and it turns out to be my favorite form of architecture: modern efficiency, sleek design, and wild nature all intertwined.

Back at the visitor center they had a scale model of the campus showing all the buildings, above ground and below, paired with an impressive AR app running on iPads you could borrow from the information desk. You could expand the engineering layer by layer and see all the thoughtful work that went into it. I got lunch at the cafe and pulled out my laptop at a table while an enthusiastic man gave a class at the next table over on how to make art on an iPad. I picked up a t-shirt featuring the old six-color logo, only available there at the visitor center.

Around 1982, the school where my dad worked had a single Apple ][+ computer, and he was allowed to bring it home when school was out for the summer. I was in sixth grade in a poor rural area, and that computer was my gateway to the world. There was no internet, of course, but my mom found disk swaps, I bought magazines, I recorded software onto cassettes in the middle of the night off AM radio. Over time the ][+ became a ][e and then the portable ][c. When my family went on road trips to visit relatives, I’d bring the little computer and a small CRT monitor along and spend the long hours typing in code from the pages of magazines. It’s no exaggeration to say those years with those early computers put me on the path I’ve turned into a career. I’ve never had a computer class in my life, but I know how to figure out what I need to do to make a computer do what I want, and it all goes back to those days.

Standing on that observation deck looking out at trees, knowing the building was hiding right behind them, felt like exactly the right way to honor where I started. The kid with the cassette tapes and the magazine listings didn’t grow up to work for Apple, but he did grow up to be the kind of person who appreciates a building that knows how to get out of the forest’s way.

Thinking About

The launch was an unqualified success, but it’s no time to rest on our laurels. Our team has to keep pushing, first to the other lab in Austin, and then into the next parts of the overall workflow. For me personally, I need to press on and assert myself into the even bigger picture. I want to be the principal software engineer overseeing the growing oncology side of the business, and I can clearly see how to get there from here.

What’s Next

Man or Astro-man? is playing at the 40 Watt next weekend, headlining the first day of a music festival celebrating one of our long-time local record labels. They’re my all-time favorite band to see live and I cannot wait. It’s a rare treat to catch them these days.

After a week of three a.m. shifts and laboratory fluorescents, an Athens club show feels like the perfect way to come back down to earth.