I was asked on Monday morning if some of the systems team could work on a brand new web site. I said “Of course” or something like that. We imported data, created a simple database and then got to work writing the code. It’s really a series of searches and then some views. We used MVC and LINQ to SQL as the model and a bit of JS for the maps and auto-complete.
Monday was not all spent in doing this work. While we were doing that, others where designing the layouts and the look and feel of the site. When I left work on Tuesday we had a functioning site which looked terrible. We hadn’t used the style sheets from our CSS/HTML guru and some pages still didn’t exist. I wasn’t at work on Wednesday, but this morning it looked brilliant. Others had put in some extra hours the night before.
This morning we had to rewrite some of the LINQ so it created better SQL statements, finalise where some external files were going to live, finish the wording of few things and get ready for the anticipated load. With 15 minutes to go before the Prime Minister announced the site we deployed what we had ready.
The infrastruture and database guys and gal did an incredible great job of distributing the load and keeping it running while it was being hammered. It was under massive load. We were later able to make a change which reduced the load on the database servers. That helped. This afternoon we did a few tweaks and nice to haves as well as a few spelling corrections. A few more are ready for tomorrow.
Nothing to live in 3.5 days. Not bad for project owner, a designer, project manager, 3 developers, a tester, a CSS/HTML wizard, 2 DBAs, 3 platform guys and our head of development. The work load was in phases and only a few were full time for all of it, but everyone had a massive hand it getting it done.
I am proud to have worked with everyone on it.
Oh yeah, I’ve not mentioned what it was. LandCheck. To all in Christchurch, I hope the site can give you some information which can help answer questions about your properties future. The data will get updated, so lets hope we see a lot more green as the months go on.
