I work for a software company. The thing about software companies is they’re always making improvements to their software. And so periodically — typically every 60 days or so — we release those changes out into the wild. When that happens, the other technical writer and I have to make sure the Help Center is all up to date and reflecting those changes.

But the previous release, scheduled for early November, was canceled. I guess the devs needed more time for the new features. Unfortunately, I’d already made changes to the Help Center, and it would’ve been a huge waste of time and effort to try to roll it back. (Don’t ask why.)

So, suffice it to say that we held all the changes we’d made from the end of October through December 6. All those updates went live at the same time, late in the afternoon of release night.

How many are we talking about? Well, for reference, we normally publish 100 or so pages on a release night. On a big night, we’d publish 200 pages. We have to check every one of those pages: What were the changes, and did the changes make it into production? This is not as easy as it sounds, because we have ways of excluding content, and it’s surprisingly easy to inadvertently exclude — or not exclude — content that gets published to production. Hence the diligent checking.

This release, we published 1,080 pages

Imagine two people trying to diligently check over 1,000 pages.

We spent the entire week running up to the release pre-checking pages, even working from home to keep on pre-checking. But even just spot-checking 1,080 pages takes a long time. We anticipated leaving work very, very late.

Fortunately, the company buys dinner for everyone who has to stay late for releases, including us! This time, a different person was responsible for organizing the dinner. She opted to do a group order from Cheesecake Factory.

Ug.

Have you looked at their menu lately? It’s really just different ways to combine grease, carbs, and sugar. This from me, and I love grease, carbs, and sugar! But reading the menu, I could just imagine what a gut-bomb any of those meals would be once I’d consumed all 1,500+ calories.

Again: Ug.

But it’s the Cheesecake Factory. Naturally, the menu includes tons of cheesecakes. I opted to take the road less traveled (by which I mean totally untraveled; nobody else did this) and I ordered an entire cheesecake for dinner. Just the cheesecake. 

Here it is, in all its release-night glory, my 7″ lemon-raspberry cheesecake:

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure the people organizing dinner would let me order an entire cheesecake. I thought somebody would stop me. But no; it went right through and arrived along with everyone else’s gut-bombs.

That’s not to say I didn’t get many comments along the lines of, “You ordered an entire cheesecake?!” to which I gave the only possible answer: “Yes. Yes, I did.”

I took some to save for later, and I took as much as I wanted for the evening (one moderate slice), and then I put the rest out to share. Locusts descended and gleefully partook. It lasted a grand total of maybe five minutes after I made it widely available, and all takers greatly enjoyed the fruits of my audacity.

It was the best release night dinner I’ve ever had. Delightful. 

I hope they let us order Cheesecake Factory again. I’m keen to try one of the chocolate cheesecakes this time.

Oh…yes, in case you’re wondering, I did actually provide myself with a real dinner.