Meidura soft-launch day — Oct 6–7

Soft-launch day in numbers: 7 releases · 0 rollbacks · suite 4,448 → 4,561 green · home page 5.6s → 0.15s.

Yesterday was the day Meidura had to work for real people, not just for the test suite. Sign-in was stranding Chrome and Safari on the main domain. Publishing left friends with drafts and no clear next step. The public face still said “Join free” while we were invite-only. Sponsors got a page that looked unfinished on a phone. And the home page took five and a half seconds to load.

That stack cleared in one sprint.

What members and visitors can feel now:

• Sign-in on meidura.com no longer dead-ends; Google explains every failure and survives switching accounts; invite codes last as long as the link.
• “Finish your next photo (N left)” walks drafts one after another with the city remembered; reminder mail now names the real steps and deep-links the oldest draft.
• Signed-out visitors see a nine-photo watermarked showcase; the CTA is “Request an invitation”; one shared photo can be public while the rest stay invite-only.
• The sponsor page carries real photos in phone frames, founding pricing through 500 active members, and a renewal rule that actually means something.
• Staff tools: outbound mail log, a usable member table, one-key publish, and a 12-hour review nudge.

Behind that: 72 commits on the integration branch, nine features and twelve fixes classified across the seven releases (E383–E389), eight defects stopped before release (seven by the browser gate, one by the PM’s full run). Live tip is 9afa0ea; rollback target 04e244d with no data change.

What’s still quiet on purpose: weekly invites (built, waiting on a yes), Stripe sponsor payments (aimed at Oct 11), and the 22 drafts that never moved — Eric 13, Jen 8, Eaton 1. Soft launch means friends can join and photos can land. It does not mean every draft is published yet.

Speed came from measuring first. The slow path wasn’t our app code — it was the database compiler. Turn JIT off for Meidura connections and the same pages drop under a second.

Soft launches are supposed to feel a little quiet. This one feels quiet in the good way: people can get in, the public face is honest about invite-only, the sponsor story is sellable, and the boring machinery (browser gate, full suite on the exact SHA, live check after every release) did its job.

More when those drafts become publishes — and when the growth gates we already built get flipped on purpose.