Operational Excellence in April Fools’ Pranks
Thomas A. Limoncelli · Queue · 2017
Successful pranks require care and planning. Write a design proposal and a project plan. Involve operations early. If this is a technical change to your website, perform load testing, preferably including a "dark launch" or hidden launch test. Hide the prank behind a feature flag rather than requiring a new software release. Perform a retrospective and publish the results widely. Remember that some of the best pranks require little or no technical changes at all. For example, one could simply summarize the best practices for launching any new feature but write it under the guise of how to launch an April Fools’ prank. That would be hilarious.