We’re tired though; this release night was… very demanding. The actual software release went swimmingly as usual; @medhatgayed did a great job of making sure all the i’s were dotted and t’s properly crossed. And it paid off again as he smoothly guided our production platform into version 4.6.

The… challenge was with the release night awesome entertainment. Since the UV paint episode we had to think long and hard about what we could do that would be at least as awesome. As it turns out, more awesome things are also much more work.

Take painting a large Yellow wall for example. It sounds like simple thing. It sounds pretty easy.  It feels pretty damn painfully hard.

Have a look at the video below. We took it upon ourselves to awesomeify the big yellow wall next to which we sit. And we succeeded spectacularly, but it took  7 hours, 3 coats of paint, 3 tins of paint, 2 rolls of painters tape, several people, buckets of sweat and one or two tears… Tears of joy, at how damn beautiful our Yellow Finda logo turned out!

Now… to get through the rest of the day without actually losing the will to live completely and the job will be done…

Always be awesome.

Go Big Or Go Home

Another Go Big Or Go Home

Yellow Finda

The Thing That Was Done

The whole operation almost turned into an epic fail but some quick thinking by one @semaj_nil and an hour’s colouring saved it! Sort of. As it turns out, the contrast of green on yellow doesn’t exactly lend it’s self to be scanned well on a phone. We attempted to fix the contrast issue by colouring in the post-it’s with permanent marker… hacking the fail; agile to the max. That’s how we roll.

It still doesn’t scan on my phone at all but it seems to work just fine on some people’s old iPhones, so I guess that covers most people.

So the lesson for this evening? QR codes need to be in high contrast colours… and must remain so after they are converted to black and white.

And now, for your enjoyment, The Video Of The Construction Of The QR Code:

Also, we have Some Stills… Of The Construction Of The QR Code:

A large green and black QR code.

Medhat, mid KILL.

Robert and James doing things and stuff.

The video, getting Product Managed.

The things that are the QR code.

To see some of the new Finda listing page widgets that we released, go here:

http://www.finda.co.nz/business/listing/1hd/finda-co-nz/

and here:

http://www.finda.co.nz/business/listing/4mcf8k/jayson-kingsbeer-photography/

Always be awesome. That is all.

We’ve started a tradition with Finda releases to decorate the big Yellow wall that looms over the developers. To make it more friendly, to make it more Finda. As you will see in the video and pictures below, last night, we made it a LOT Finda. Awesome Finda.

The tools of the evening are two 42″ UV black lights (from Surplustronics who have an awesome collection of lights and electronic goodies) and three colours of invisible UV ink. Thanks to True Colours who sponsored us a vinyl Finda logo stencil we were able to… dab… small amounts of UV ink onto the big ‘ol Yellow wall making a nice, mostly invisible, Finda logo right there to look out over the awesome Yellow Coding Ninjas. Then things got… out of hand… you’ll see what I mean.

And now, for your enjoyment, the Epic Release Night Video V3:

A couple of stills to illustrate what’s up:

Now you don't see it...

And now you do!

One of them 'out of hand' things...

This, is, Finddaaaaaaaa

This, is, Finddaaaaaaaa

Here’s the main video, ‘The Changing Of The Logo’ (I literally just made that up, seriously):

This is ‘The Making Of The Changing Of The Logo’:

And that is how you release software properly.

Edit: Just re-uploaded the video’s to YouTube (good old YouTube), hopefully they’re all there this time…

Testing picked up a couple of minor issues that the guys are busy fixing but otherwise, we’re done!

@keranm is busy sorting out our epic release night video’s at this very moment and I’ll post them the second they’re done!

And now… for a wonderful Thursday filled to the brim with meetings…

So, we’re busy with our little ‘something something’ project, making the awesome flow at the office in the middle of the night.

Looking around, it’s completely clear that not only are we a bunch of computer geeks, we’re an insane bunch of camera geeks too. The camera equipment manifest for release evening:

• Sony A55 (moved to the top at the request of one @keranm)
• Canon 550D
• Canon 550D
• Canon 40D
• Canon 450D
• Canon 7D

We’ve got the 7D capturing a time-lapse of the developers area for now (changed at the request of one @keranm) and we’ll be putting the others to use for project ‘something something’.

Check back later, hopefully we’ll have some epic release footage up!

To celebrate the auspicious occasion, the team put a little something together to document release night. I think this kind of thing will turn into a tradition pretty quickly!