Page 77 of Free Agent

As stressful as this was, it was also… exhilarating.

I hadn’t been locked in like this in a very long time. Most of my coding these days was focused on updates to the innovation we’d already created. No big undertaking, like this, that held real weight.

So in a way, I guess I was kinda grateful.

Or would be, once this was over.

Again… it took sixteen hours. Which was actually insanely fast for a project of this size and heft, but the others had found those bonus checks very motivational. And now… it was time to put it to a real test.

Our last step test environment.

The one that was technically available for anyone to access if they knew how to get there. We needed the true user experience, so it had to be this way.

It was just scary.

If it went wrong, this was the kind of mistake that was hard to bounce back from.

I waited, chest tight, next breath lodged in my throat, as my development team ran the process one more time. Prayers up, fingers and toes crossed, whatever little edge I could get in my favor, down to wishing on the sun—the most readily available star—that it would complete without a hitch.

“Come on…” I muttered, not daring to take my eyes away from the screens in front of me.

On one, line after line of what would appear to be an endless keyboard smash to the untrained eye generated, deployed with a single click of a button. Beside it was the customized monitor, a large screen depicting an oversized phone screen, currently displaying the user-interface powered by the running code.

Correctly displaying it.

But that wasn’t enough.

As slow as it felt watching it happen, the load time for the app was less than a second, instantaneous, or as close as we could get it for the user, thanks to detailed coding prowess. I would’ve preferred we get it fast enough to go back in time and open a full second before our customers decided to tap our icon, but I was managing my expectations.

For now.

I stepped closer to the display, tapping the designated sign in button.

The thing that had been giving us, and the nearly one million monthly users we’d amassed, the blues. My hands shook as I typed in the admin email we used in our test environment. I had to backspace a couple of times as my clumsy fingers plodded over the keys, hitting the wrong things.

No one said a word.

Finally, I managed to get the proper credentials keyed in, but I hesitated after, reluctant to hit submit.

If this didn’t work, it meant hours—more hours—of debugging, and a waste of all the ones we’d just spent trying to correct an issue we hadn’t caused.

I couldn’t ask that of my team. Bonus check or not, we were exhausted from a marathon of coding, trying to get ahead of even more negative reviews about a flawed user experience.

Not flawed… no user experience, because they couldn’t log in, which meant they couldn’t actually access anything, which was… whew.

My head was hurting again.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I hit submit, and waited.

Not for long.

This too was lightning-fast by design, as were the instant tears that sprang to my eyes when the clean modern white, mint, and yellow interface loaded in front of me, filled with the information of our “test case”.

Relief.

A round of applause went up around the room, but my limbs were so weak with released tension I couldn’t raise my hands to join them.

Instead, I sank.

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