Day 7: May the Force be with You.

As I was leaving school on Saturday, you can imagine how excited I was to see “soft lunch” on the Panelizr schedule for Sunday. What exactly is a “soft lunch?” Maybe soft tacos? Soft shell crabs? Picnic lunch where we all sit on pillows? My mind wandered all Saturday night and well into Sunday morning.

However, come Sunday’s meeting time at 3pm, a harsh reality set in: Soft Launch does not equal Soft Lunch. Everyone was disappointed. Like clockwork, mother nature chimed in with a huge thunderstorm and the war room once again became dark and dreary. Food was running low and the smell in the room continued to get worse. While it was hard for us to notice the aroma while we were working, the sweet smell of sweat, nerd, and Chipotle was very obvious to any visitors who stopped in.

Lucky for us, none of our followers on the interweb know what the war room smells like (until they read this blog post). They only see the sexy, new and improved Panlizr branding that took over the web on Sunday. The new sleek look came courtesy of the hard work done by Bryan “Harley4Lyfe” Callison, Heather “I Wear Calvin” Klein, and Claiborne “These Boots are Made for Walkin” Buckingham. At least now, one thing is guaranteed: Panelizr will look fresh.

The soft launch scheduled for later that night was the next big step in bringing what was once jut an idea, to life. Early in the afternoon, while the database was connected, we would have had to shut down the rest of the internet to load all 1,600 SXSW panels.  As the development team chugged away, Jeff “Apple Store” MacDonald (appropriately dressed in his Apple Store apparel) had a brilliant idea of how to get CTs working at maximum potential: play Star Wars. As you would expect, live quoting was continuous and the eternal debate lived on… would you rather have a stormtrooper suit or a Han Solo Carbonite coffee table?

While that debate will never end, we did learn something very awesome by the end of the night. Panelizr works. Not perfectly. Not always smoothly. But after a long day of work by the dev team, an alpha version of our site is up and running.

And it’s awesome.

Seacrest Out.