Going live

Ezra Olubi

As a developer, the most exciting moment about your product can easily be when people start making use of that shiny new code you pushed, and everything hums along just fine. Or not. For some reason, I tend to prefer the latter, because you see the problems right away, and get to work fixing them which eventually culminates in that additional sense of pride in your work.We promised the world we would move Paystack to public beta back in December. As a matter of fact, we raced towards making this happen between December 7 and 11. Rhyme not intended. These were nights without sleep for me, well partly because my clock also hadn’t fully adjusted to Nigerian time as I found myself sleeping more between the hours of 11am and 6pm. Then the slow downs began. It was like finishing 98% of the work, and then taking your sweet time to do the remaining 2%. There was one excuse or the other for not finishing up. Random retouches to parts of the already completed 98%, and occasional implementation that go on a tangent and actually belong to a different sprint altogether. I had dreamed and visualized a go live post on the 1st of January, but oh well.

Eventually, we decided the second weekend in January would be it. And boy, did we look forward to it. It was also the weekend my cofounder and I would be moving to our new apartment in Sunnyvale – a post on this later. Saturday came and yes we knew it was going to be a long day. What we didn’t realise early enough was that we were not going to touch one line of code the entire weekend. People still reached out to me to confirm if we were going

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