We are so close to launching Equals now. Earlier this week I thought we’d be inviting a few people to try it out this week. And then Tuesday happened.

We finally got everything pushed up to the server, code that had been working perfectly for the last week or two on my Mac. Honestly, it was amazing! In five-six days worth of testing I only found a handful of issues, most of which were really small issues that were fixed in a day or two. There was no crashing at all.

Keep in mind this was a far cry from the prototype we worked on last winter. That prototype crashed constantly and the bugs were nasty. Rick spent three months tracking down and fixing four crashing bugs, all of which were non-repeatable and all of which were crashing on some systems and not others. To make matters worse, it always seemed to crash on the platforms where we couldn’t step through the code with a debugger. So when we ran the engine on our Macs and nothing crashed and things worked, we were both celebrating!

So we pushed to the server on Tuesday and the first thing I did, the first calculation I ran, crashed the server! The first thing!

I held my breath.

A little bit of panic set in. A little bit of depression, too.

We had clearly hit the high point on our rollercoaster called launch and was turning the corner to plummet back down into the pits. I hate this ride. Maybe it’s time to walk away. Maybe this is a sign from the gods that it isn’t meant to be.

Luckily I wasn’t in charge of finding and fixing the bug. So we sent off some feelers to the hosting company to see if there was a server issue we needed to know about and get some pointers on how to debug the issue. Wednesday night Rick narrowed the bug down to a third-party library we are using in the engine and Thursday night he found and fixed the problem. Meanwhile, I was tasked with “doing other things.”

I woke up this morning to a fixed and running engine, and suddenly the rollercoaster is going back up hill again and all is right with the world and we might be able to invite some people to try it out today anyway.

I’m breathing again.