Break Out the Cigars

We've officially birthed a baby website. As of 11:02PM on Friday, June 27, 2008, noozler.com is live to the world.

The launch itself was rather anti-climatic as we'd all been working like madmen since before 9am that morning and were dead tired as a result. Additionally, all the launch itself technically entailed was removing a login prompt from our webroot. Hardly the type of epic enterprise deployment evenings we'd grown accustomed to at larger organizations... well, aside from the 14 hour day part.

It was a momentous moment nonetheless, as this was the culmination of many months of blood, sweat and beers. We celebrated with a bottle of cheap champagne and a simple toast in my kitchen.

We decided to keep things quiet on the search engine and extended friend networks for the time being to see how things go with a smaller ramp of traffic. All I can say at this point is "so far so good." Gabe has been working hard on adding some grace to the underpinnings, Keith has been knocking out bugs (in between bouts with laptop-itis) and I've been adding copy while Yana graciously volunteered her time to the unenviable task of entering celebrity relationships.

Tonight we all celebrated by visiting Keith's new apartment to plan where he'll hang all of his Debbie Gibson posters and then having a few drinks in the Mission (The Monk's Kettle at 16th and Valencia is now officially endorsed by GDK Software, BTW). It was a quiet, happy evening that capped a quiet, happy launch. We've all been around the software block enough times to know better than to expect all releases to be so smooth, but here's to hoping!

www.noozler.com

Resiliency is a warm gun

As those close to us already know, it's been a rough few months for everyone at GDK. A trifecta of personal suckitude hit the GDK triumvirate about two months ago. Despite the setbacks (which included two untimely passings and a divorce) we're back with all hooves running, and Noozler is ready to launch!

We're planning a small, unheralded release this coming Friday with intensive usage analysis and bug tracking to follow. The good news here is that, despite all (or perhaps because of) the hard times, the product is far more mature than we'd hoped it to be for initial release, so flames from our friends and family should be on the minimal side of soul crushing.

Hopefully this also ushers in the era of me no longer having to play the role of sysadmin. I'm quite certain Gabe is tired of me taking hours instead of minutes to figure out how apxs does its magic.