Battling the WhizKids: How I kept my website up in spite of the Prime Software Contractor
1999, the lead up to Y2K was a horrendous year for me. Too many long weeks, too much travel, tight deadlines, multiple competing projects, not enough sleep and a level of exhaustion that compromised my short-term memory and took around 5 years to mostly recover from... So at the end of 1999, when a long term friend, Peter, offered me a part-time contract looking after a few web-servers, it sounded like a doodle. Easy work, reasonable hours and good people to work with. What's not to like?!?! I got more 80+ hour weeks, a horror project and an exceedingly difficult Software supplier to work with. But because of my efforts, the site stayed up, remained usable and our area was the only part of the overall project to not make the papers (in a bad way). Apparently the project won a Gold Government Technology Award as well. I presented a paper on the Performance aspects at CMG-A and a presentation . All this and a very high-profile website: the first large-scale on-line Transaction of th...