

Ask HN/PG: On App Submission - d4ft

Question for HN Alums or for PG himself-<p>If one submits an app, and is actively developing a site but that site is still really in the early stages (read: janky/still needing work, sometimes broken as new things are added), is it worth including the site at all?<p>I ask because every time I push updates I worry that the site will break, and that will be the minute my app is reviewed.<p>Thoughts?
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pg
Submit your application when it's 90% as good as it will be.

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RealGeek
Post a notice on your site while you are updating the code and restore when
done.

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bmelton
Well, the first thing I'd say is to work on your deployment model. While
nothing is ever bullet-proof, you should definitely be ironing out deployment
kinks before go-live anyway.

One of the things I've done in the past is standing up an additional VM to
deploy things to -- sandbox changes occur on my PC alone, those changes are
pushed to 'dev', wherein I ensure that the base functionality works. In the
process of updating dev, I script or document every change that I had to make
to migrate it to current -- I then test those scripts and procedures to the
new instance ('qa') and run unit tests against them before believing that it
will work in production.

Even still, you can't guarantee that production won't contain some data or
user content that could break things, but it should at least get you more up
to speed in double and triple checking your deployment strategies.

Another idea you might try is to just set up a 'stable' site on either another
domain or sub-domain, and make absolutely sure that doesn't change (or at
least doesn't change nearly as often) at something like stable.yourdomain.com,
and point reviewers to that, with the advice that it may not be 'current'.

