My friend launched his tool a few weeks back and texted me at like 7am saying he was already awake refreshing the page. I checked in around noon and he hadn't eaten, hadn't left his desk, just kept switching between the upvote count, the comments, and Twitter mentions on repeat.
At one point the ranking dropped two spots and he called me convinced something had gone wrong, even though the actual upvote count was still going up. I tried telling him the number going down for a second didn't mean much, but it didn't really land in the moment.
What got me was that he barely replied to half the comments people left, because he was too busy watching the count instead of talking to the people leaving it. Told me afterward that the conversations he did have were the part that actually mattered, way more than where he landed on the board, but he only realized that after the day was basically over.
I haven't launched anything myself yet, so I don't know if this is just how day one always goes or if he made it harder on himself than it needed to be. For people who've actually done this, is the refreshing and spiraling pretty universal, or is there something you did differently that kept you sane? And for anyone else who hasn't launched yet either, does hearing this make you more nervous about your own launch day, or does knowing it happens to almost everyone take some of the pressure off?
Mine was trusting the diff summary instead of actually reading the diff.
I used to just glance at "renamed X, updated Y files, tests passing" and move on. Then one day the agent quietly changed a timeout value in a config file while it was "cleaning up," totally unrelated to what I asked for. Nothing broke locally, so it shipped. Took three days in prod before anyone noticed requests were timing out way faster than before.
