Our experience of organizing CrazyEngineers Day Celebrations!

CEans,

First of all, a big thank you to all those who became the part of CrazyEngineers Day celebrations on November 26. CE is now 5 years old, over 85k engineers strong and reaches to over 180 countries across the globe.

We had initially planned to Celebrate 5[sup]th[/sup] anniversary in various parts of the world by asking CEans from their cities to gather and celebrate together. However, the plan was then changed to celebrating together online. Newsletters were sent, announcements were made, our CEans wrote blog posts to inform people about CrazyEngineers Day, we sent PMs, invited our old members back and so on.

Just two days before the D-day, a new idea popped up - Organizing A Quiz Competition. We had just few hours to set everything up and also make it interesting. The biggest challenge was to come up with questions for which the answers were not found directly by Googling! We found out that it was a real challenge. So we decided to keep a mix of questions and believe that we did come up with nice set of questions.

We had to drop few audio/visual questions as not everyone would have access to video/audio streaming (especially those who login from their offices). It literally worked day & night for two days and finally got the questions ready just few minutes before the online gathering time. 😀 I wish we had gotten the quiz idea few days ago; we'd have done a much better job.

As the clock struck 5 and CEans started flooding in; we started monitoring the server. Note that we run CE in 'cloud' (know cloud computing?) and we were 100% sure that there won't be any server issue no matter how many CEans logged in simultaneously. But we neglected an important part of CE - The CE Conference!

CE Conference is Ajax powered. In simple words, it only fetches the data from the server, thus eliminating the need of refreshing the whole page. For the CE-Day, we had enabled the Conference for all the visitors which caused the server to be pinged every 5 seconds for all the members. That caused the server load to shoot up within just few minutes before we could take any action. Unfortunately, the server broke down and we had to reboot it, thus making CE unavailable for about 2 minutes.

I had to phone our server administrators in the USA to fix the issue. These are the types of issues, that aren't easily identified. By the time we identified the correct issue, the server had to be rebooted two more times!

However, CEans did not give up! I am really surprised by the love, passion and patience you all showed when CE went down. Thank you for not giving up!

Finally, the issue was identified and CE was back to Rock! The Brain Twister Contest went live and we all had lot of fun monitoring and responding to threads!

Oh well, we'd have loved to share this with you --



C -> Chocolate Delight 😛
E -> Honey Almond 😛