OS_LOG: 035

Yo.

Let me tell you about the morning I nearly threw up from nerves.

I'd been working with 1X for the past year. Their preorder launch for NEO (the flagship product) kept getting delayed. Until one day the delays stopped. We had a hard date. It was finally happening.

Their team mentioned we're expecting order volume in the tens of thousands and traffic in the millions. A whole lot of pressure for a solo engineer who built the order payment flow by himself.

To make things even more intense, 1X has a marketing team like no other. They know how to get a fuckload of eyeballs on their stuff. Meaning my shit needed to work. Otherwise all of their efforts were going to be worthless.

Fast forward to the morning of the launch. I was up at 3am with the site going live at 8am.

The only task I had that morning was to update some video content on the site.

At 5am (3 hours out) I tried to update via the CMS.

Error.

Refresh. Error.

Refresh. Error. Fuck.

I couldn't update the content. There was an error I'd never seen before that only showed up the morning of. This was the moment I felt I was going to throw up.

If the content couldn't be updated, the site couldn't go live, and the traffic generating efforts might have been lost.

But after an hour and a half of hand shaking debugging, I found a fix. Content was updated.

We pushed live at 8am and orders started rolling in. It worked.

I can't say the exact amount of orders (there were a lot) but we were getting around 30 to 50K page visits every 30 minutes. 50 thousand people interacting with code I'd written. Every 30 minutes. Wild.

For the next week I sat on call, ready to solve issues that came up. Apart from a few small typos and some tighter validation, it worked perfectly.

No orders failed. The project was a massive success.

I'm super proud of myself for what I was able to achieve that morning. I blew a lot of self doubt out of the water because the evidence was too obvious to ignore.

If you ever get the opportunity to be in a situation like this, take it.

Pressure is a privilege. Not a curse.

Other cool projects from the past few months:

Impulse. I worked with Dennis and Case from Special Projects on this one. Crazy cool product. Beautiful design. Absolute pleasure to build.

Hamilton Capital. My first big 3D scene project that wasn't a test. We built a portal/focus like preloader that I think is super sick. Worked with Onbox on this one. Awesome team of super talented designers.

Ballpark is going live soon.

For those who don't know, Ballpark is the first piece of software I've built under Over-Stimulated. It's a pricing widget for your portfolio. Asks visitors a few questions, calculates an estimate from rules you set, sends them a nice looking ballpark quote, and drops their details into a simple CRM. All automatic.

It removes all the back and forth emailing just to get a price. I've been using it on my site for the past 6 months and I love it.

If you want to get notified when it's live you can sign up at ballpark.ing. No pressure.

So yeah.

I definitely pushed too hard the last few months. Took on way too much. Shed a few too many tears. But now I'm back doing shit I actually enjoy, like writing this email, surfing, and my morning beach walk with the pup.

Next email I'm launching my first product under Over-Stimulated. Expect mistakes. lol

See you in two weeks. Keep crushing.

Will