I’m so glad it’s Friday. I was going to post yesterday that my project went live on AA.com, but…it didn’t. We turned it on in the wee hours of the morning and our traffic slammed the downstream third party system and promptly hosed them. My favorite question from the repeated conference calls was “So, you were load testing or something at 5 in the morning, right, because we saw a lot of traffic?”

Um. No. It’s called….production! Those were our users. The ones we told you about when we first coded the project and told you to scale it appropriately. They just couldn’t fathom such traffic. Our site gets 24×7 activity from around the globe. Millions use it every day and it generates an order of magnitude more than that in revenue each day. So far not impressed with this group at all, and the sad thing is we’re planning to use them more and more in the future. Our group needs to take them over. Every process or group we take over we end up making it more reliable, more efficient.

So…if and when my project goes live I’ll post about it here. Until then, remember, we’re American Airlines, and we know why you fly.

*Holding hands to sides of my head*
“Um, to get home to your kids right?”
No.
“Um, for a vacation, right?”
No.
“Okay, gimme a friggin’ clue here people!”

Sorry, bad airline humor.