It doesn’t matter if it’s a personal blog on your own IIS server at home or a new corporate commerce site for your company’s newest product, there’s a certain amount of joy in a successful website launch. The process has a lot of moving parts, usually involving a team of people including the developers who wrote the website to the web admins and network engineers who configure the communication and security to the internet.
One of my favorite launches was for a large customer that had warehouses all over the world. They had been taking customer orders over the phone for many years and wanted to move their order processing to the web. After the development team completed the new order process application, I completed the web server infrastructure, security, and all the configuration changes and testing that had to be done to launch the site on the internet (the same things you’ll do in a month of lunches).
Seeing that first order get placed and processed through the new website was pretty cool. The customer had a new communication line with their customers for order processing, and I got to be a part of building the solution.