A tiny Christmas e-commerce miracle

It was the afternoon of Christmas Eve, and I was at my desk, at home.

It had been a very quiet week. At least, it was quiet in contrast to the outright pandemonium that was the week before. I won't go through the finer details, but it had been a week that was chock-full of last-minute development work, feature requests and meetings late into the night.

I was sitting on my high stool in the living room staring at a wall of code on the screen of my laptop and doing my darnedest to reverse-engineer that sucker when suddenly I realized something: it had been two full days since anyone called me to do anything so much as change the font size on an invoice template.

Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

Not to say a bit of quiet wasn't a welcome change, but it did make me wonder - where the hell was everybody?

A conversation with a colleague informed me that the Marketing Team, along with the Director, and a few others had spent the past couple days packing deliveries for the orders that were due during Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. And this revelation left me rather stunned because...

...well, let's start from the beginning, shall we?

Backstory

I had joined this company back in October. The first task I was assigned to, was to write an interface for online shoppers that would link up with the company CRM in order to retrieve their Reward Points, and subsequently earn more Reward Points via online purchases. Previously, this had not been possible because the e-store had only been set up a few months ago. The problem statement was: we are losing sales because customers cannot redeem Reward Points or earn them via the e-store. Fix this ASAP.

Fix this.

So I got to work. Other than guidance from the Director and the Marketing Team, I was pretty much on my own. As this was a rush job, no one had any time for my notions of best practices, clean code or unit testing. I threw all that out the window and did what I arguably do best in the absence of all other technical skill - improvise. I won't bore you with the details of how it was eventually done, only that by the end of the third week, after a couple rounds of UAT, we went live.

Chaos ensued the next couple weeks as we grappled with the realities of going live. Schedules had to be adjusted, customizations had to be made for Christmas, and the Marketing Team was responsible for no small amount of changes I had to keep up with. Everyone from Finance to Customer Service seemed to feel the need to weigh in as well. And at that point, things were going slow. The take-up rate for this new feature didn't seem to be adding significantly to revenue, though the fact that it was adding to revenue at all, meant that it worked. Eventually, I got caught up in other tasks and stopped obsessing over how well it was working. It was working, and that would have to be enough for now. I had bigger fish to fry.

Another week passed. Out of nowhere, I was interrupted in the middle of my lunch break to attend to an urgent request - disable all online orders for Christmas Eve. Apparently, Logistics was having some issue or other. Something struck me as odd here, but I got it done and put it out of my mind.

Back to the present

Apparently, my code had served as the bridge to a whole lot of online traffic (and subsequent online sales) while I was busy elsewhere. The volume was so large that Logistics was having trouble in fulfilment. It had gotten so bad that the Marketing Team and Director had needed to personally help with the packing!

Packing!

And that's mind-boggling.

The scrappy piece-of-shit code that still had lots of room for improvement (denoted by TODOs littered in the comments here and there) that I had somehow managed to scrape together in a couple of weeks, had actually helped achieve that much. Not only had it resolved the problem statement, it had exceeded my wildest expectations.

Kudos to the Marketing Team

The Marketing Team had done a phenomenal job in my estimation. They were the driving force behind the crazy volume of sales that had led to this situation. All I had realistically done was build a bridge - it was the Marketing Team that actually increased awareness and drove traffic over that old, rickety bridge.

An old, rickety bridge.

Sure, there would still have been sales if the Marketing Team hadn't gotten involved - just nowhere near these insane numbers. And for that, I give them all the credit in the world. After all, the code I cobbled together either works or doesn't work. If sales hadn't been good, no one would be blaming me for it. So it's only logical that, if things went this well, the Marketing Team should be taking credit.

Well, happy holidays!

It's going to be a good weekend, and I'm just going to take some time to marvel over what we achieved together.

Ho-ho-holy shit,
T___T