logoalt Hacker News

adriand • today at 4:59 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

I'm shipping new features to my SaaS customers sometimes as quickly as the same day they bring it up. These are usually fairly small, obviously. I actually posted this story on LinkedIn, as one does:

> Customer email, 9:42 am: "I have a partner asking for our SSH2 public key. I tried using Tediware help but eventually it said to contact support. Are you able to assist?"

> Response, 10:47 am: "You need to generate a key pair yourself and keep the private key. Tediware does not issue SSH keys. Here's what you do. [instructions follow]"

> Follow-up response, 12:20 pm: "Generating your own key pair is now part of the app."

> Time from support request to new feature designed, coded, tested, deployed and announced: 2 hours, 38 minutes.

Side note, this feature has been solid in prod ever since (that story is a couple of months old).

Obviously, some things take weeks still, but they're hard. I just finished writing an X12 translator/parser, from scratch, in Rust. The old translator/parser was written in Ruby and ran documents at 175 kb/s. The new one handles 1 MB/s. It took me seven weeks of on-again/off-again dev work, fuzzing, testing, etc. It went live in prod yesterday.


Replies

skydhash • today at 5:10 PM

> > Time from support request to new feature designed, coded, tested, deployed and announced: 2 hours, 38 minutes.

What about risk assessment? Are the customers guinea pigs?

jimbokun • today at 6:21 PM

Paul Graham talked about fixing bugs on the production server while the customer was still on the phone, because it was written in Lisp.