Today was the rather anticlimactic release of PolicyCenter 3.0.0.  Anticlimactic because we took the release branch about two weeks ago, fixed maybe four issues in it, took a release build on Friday, didn't find any issues in it, and quietly annointed it the official release today.  As a coworker of mine pointed out, the releases everyone notices are always the ones that are the hardest to get out:  when everything is going smoothly, no one notices because it doesn't affect their day-to-day work in the least, and the release just kind of slips out without anyone on the development side paying any attention.  So the calm is just a sign of the fact that things are going well.

But honestly, it's a pretty big deal.  We started essentially rewriting the product from the inside out over a year ago, and the first part of the payoff is here in the form of a stable release where the bug list really has quiesced like it should on a well-engineered product, released on-time with no last-minute surprises.  We're able to look forward to building out the feature set in the next release, and the performance testing and tuning is going well so far on this one.  It's pretty much a best-case scenario, based on where we were 12 months ago, and I (and hopefully everyone else in the development organization) can take a lot of pride in that.  Turning something around like that is one of the hardest things you can do as an engineer, and it required not just skill and hard work by the team but also a lot of patience and courage by other people in the organization to pull the strings and make the tradeoffs and sacrifices necessary to give us the chance to do it.

So tonight, I went home and bought a nice steak, opened a nice bottle of wine (the Benziger '05 Puma Springs Cab . . . if you've never tried any of their reserve wines, you better aks somebody), skipped out on the gym, and relaxed with my fiancee.  You've got to celebrate when you get the chance.