All times are in Pacific Standard Time, relative to where our office is located. These times aren't set in stone, by any means, I only write it up here to give everyone some idea of what our typical day looks like for a beta release.
Our next release will be Tuesday, January 25th.
8:30am, we're all in the office, getting coffee or Diet Dr Pepper, and coordinating our morning events, squishing last-minute bugs. We furiously test our code internally on several operating systems and browsers to see if there are any specific layout/render bugs we need to fix. 9:00am, I flip a switch on the database to increment the next beta phase, and migrate new users to our mailing list software. Any users signing up after that will have to wait until the NEXT beta release to get an invite code. 11:30am, lunch time. BLT's all around. 12:30pm, we reconvene to do a final status check on our code, see how everything looks on our test server, and work furiously to fix last-second problems. 1:00pm, I generally start tweeting our status, what we're working on, and issues we see.
Between 1pm and 5:30pm, we get all of our code checked in, deployed to our production servers, start preparing our newsletter and get ready to queue up any invite codes.
The newsletter will explain more about what we've been working on, what's in the new release, that sort of thing, but does NOT include beta invite codes. Invite codes are always sent in a separate Email to users.
---
Our last beta invite code cut off was about 10am on January 11, so any new beta signups after that time should get an invite code on January 25th when we release our next software update.
It's important to note up front that several things will seem "missing" from the site, such as the forums, etc. This is to be expected, because we're rolling out the beta in phases where we add new features every two weeks or so.
---
While this is subject to change, our next release may include some of the following: - see how you rated a game on AG2, and update your rating to whatever you'd like it to be now - updating the utility bar to show you when users reply to your activity stream messages - search results page (whoops, we released that one early, lol)
---
Found a bug? Found something you absolutely love-omg-squee-happybacondance? Please post it on GetSatisfaction for us. The rest of the webdev team is deathly allergic to lurking in the forums, but posting a message on GS will send an Email update to everyone, which usually gets priority over other things we're doing.
Yeah, definitely clear your cache between releases... we're often changing all kinds of stuff.
We won't know until tomorrow, but due to illness in the office, we may need to push the release to Wednesday.
Shocker, I know, to give you an extra day's notice, instead of waiting until later in the day on Tuesday. ;o)
We'll update everyone tomorrow on the features of the release, etc. Justin's going to start tweeting @ArmorGames when things happen to so I can focus on getting releases out the door. He may retweet me from time to time, but he'll be more the voice on that stuff now. We're hoping it'll drive more traffic to the beta too.
Hahaha gost of matrix! Haha so it is wedness day right? I wish the beta site worked better on android so buggy! Well more like slow... but any who what is next I wonder... the forums would take a lot of time, but are you going to put it out after or before release?
It's probably slower on your Android browser because we use a LOT of javascript on the beta site, especially for the activity stream notifications. Maybe on our mobile version of the site, we'll turn off some of those javascript calls to speed things up.
Name change -- this release will be called Longsword. Apparently Larry has a different list than I do for sword names, and his isn't strictly in alphabetical order. /shrug
We aren't sure yet if it'll happen today. I gotta be outta the office by 5:30, so I'd say that if we don't release within the next hour, it'll get pushed to tomorrow. Likely it'll be tomorrow.
Hope you guys are feeling better! My two problems in GS were just marked but didn't have any replies. Did you have any ideas for why they are as they are? (grammar check)
