A message from Pablo Mercado, Director of Technology at Vox Media:
Just after we turned Polygon live I asked a developer friend of mine over IM, "So, what do you think of the site?" Her response was: "loads fast; looks great in IE." Reading those words was like hearing the best kind of dance music. Suddenly the stress and exhaustion that had been building death stars in my brain was dispelled, replaced with a big smile and desire to do things like jump up and down, drink whiskey and verbalize exclamation points. Those were great words to hear because they meant that our many, many hours of hard work had paid off, in the way that makes the most difference to our writers and readers: We launched a site that works well and is beautiful.
Launching a project is a fantastic feeling. The word "launch" is definitely the most appropriate word to use here because project launches, like rocket launches, are multi-stage events. First, a tremendous amount of energy is spent just getting the thing off the ground. Then, a second stage kicks in to push the rocket past the atmosphere. Finally, a third stage fires and guides the rocket towards its destination.
As you'll see in this week's episode, the team is now in the guidance stage. Although there will be less Champagne and slightly less jumping around, the work is no less crucial. You'll hear all sorts of words like "monitoring" and "bug tracking" and "triage" and "continuous integration." Our goals are stability, performance, measurement and improvement, and our responsibilities are to fix problems, to respond to feedback, to make our readers and writers happy, to iterate, to innovate.
Thankfully we have a great team and a great set of tools and services to help us get the job done. You'll hear about some of tools and services in the video, but since we couldn't feature everything I write this: If you have contributed to tools like Redis, or Ruby on Rails, or jQuery, or Graphite or Sass, or if you have written a blog post on how to apply gradient fills, or answered questions on StackOverflow or tweeted about a bug fix, or upvoted a sweet service on Reddit or thoughtfully debunked a claim on Hacker News, etc. — we thank you. We thank you, we thank you, we thank you. Also, we thank you.
- Pablo Mercado, Director of Technology
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