It’s been a manic three days at work.. as people in four countries have toiled day and night to get a new embeddable WorldTV player out the door – just in time for a high profile post on Techcrunch.com.
What started innocently enough with me filming a startup pitching session in London last week on my mobile phone, organized by Techcrunch UK, led to the video being used front and centre for the event wrapup article.
Mike from TCUK innocently asked me on Monday if the video could be embedded, and this spurred us to bring our development plans for this forward, and compressed probably what would have been two weeks of work into three days.
With the deadline fast approaching we had to throw caution a little to the wind and let a minimally tested widget loose in the wild on arguably the highest profile technology news website in the world. Not to be advised and definitely not encouraged. Having a widget embedded on the Techcrunch.com homepage is no joke. It meant that every one of the 100’s of thousands of people who visit the page each day was downloading our widget from our beta server. This put it under incredible strain and was similar to 100,000 people all calling your phone number at the same time. Reassuringly, the server buckled, it spat, it swore… but it didn’t break!
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.