One evening in August 2012, I and a friend were taking a stroll around Building 3 Campus. We had just signed off on a big product release. Aside the usual armchair philosophy discussion :P, another interesting topic came up - what were the painful feature cuts from the last release, and the biggest customer asks. After two more rounds around the building, we had closed on a side project to experiment and apply our learnings from last release.
17th August, 2012 - Initial checkin. And on 27th August (couple of insane coding sessions, head bangs and workarounds later), we had a workable version, so prep'd a demo video and announced our side project to the team! We got great response. The next milestone - let's productize that! We got a feature crew, threw the initial prototype design, wrote some more awesome code, broke that couple of times with our tests and.. today we announced the feature to our customers as a CTP release. Feels good. "Work on a feature from prototype to ship" - checked. Some things went well, a few lessons learned; all that in another post. For now, I'll take a deep breath and sleep :)