-READ THIS FIRST-
First things first: Chobo-ajeossi is my nickname. "Chobo" means beginner or rookie in Korean. "Ajeossi" means middle-aged uncle. Put them together and you get exactly how I feel most days running this place.
If you're here from the Instagram post, you already know we made it. MU 3.0 is live. Orders are working. Crisis averted.
But if you've got a coffee in hand and nothing better to do, pull up a chair, because the story of how we got here is something else entirely.
The setup
We've been building this new website since mid last year. Not tweaking things. Not a fresh coat of paint. We changed everything: the platform, the architecture, the product naming structure, the whole backend logic. The only thing that survived the migration intact was our logo.
During that time we talked to the community, collected feedback, ran internal reviews. We had a dev site that we tested all year. We thought we were ready.
Like any good Gundam show, we were also watching our old 2.0 slowly fall apart in the background. The mail server had started to lose its mind trying to manage two live sites at once. Error rates were climbing. It was becoming clear that the 2.0 wasn't going to hold much longer, and waiting for a "perfect moment" to launch the 3.0 was starting to look like a very bad idea. At some point you stop waiting for ideal conditions and you deploy in live combat.
So we did.
Day one: things go sideways immediately
We announced the launch. People started visiting. And then, almost instantly, the problems started stacking up. The communications module was the first to crack. Languages weren't displaying correctly across the site. Some of our proofreaders had to drop the project mid-flight. We scrambled to find new volunteers and somehow pulled that together.
Then we made the call to move the cutover one day earlier than planned, just to make sure the DNS had fully propagated across all servers before the official soft launch date.
Smart move in theory.... What followed was not theory...
The payment modules went down. All of them. And then... peak WTF! One of our providers flagged us as high risk products. No call. No email. Just a BIG RED "YOU ARE PERMAMENTLY BANNED" like we'd been caught doing something. I guess their super AI crawled our website and detected Gundanium, or too many weapon expansion packs.... who knows. And if you consider the state our languages were in at that point, whatever their AI was reading had to look absolutely special.
This is also the point where Z-Meir and I, as senior staff, the ones who are supposed to stay calm.... had a very serious conversation about pulling the plug. Spain is in holiday season. The team was exhausted. The problems kept stacking. We looked at each other and said: if there's no positive news by 16:00, we roll back to the 2.0 and deal with the embarrassment next week.
Not our proudest moment. But an honest one.
16:00 came around. And there was actually a glimmer of good news! Turns out that when you stop looking like a company actively selling Gundanium to the black market, payment providers tend to reconsider. We made some adjustments, pushed back, and apparently convinced their AI that we were perhaps slightly misclassified. Maybe, just maybe, a hobby shop selling plastic model kits wasn't quite the threat they had imagined. And from there, something shifted. Every hour, hour and a half, we recovered something. One critical module back online. Then another. Then another. Slow, grinding, but moving in the right direction for the first time all day.
Splitting the team
While the payment battle was being fought, we divided. Part of the team stayed on calls working through the remaining issues. The rest stayed on the platform trying to fix the language situation, which, to be honest, is still not fully resolved as I write this.
And then there was Becky. Becky got left alone uploading products. Just Becky, a spreadsheet, and our new backend with no interest in going fast. We had to upload the catalogue manually, there's no magic import button for all of this, and that work doesn't stop just because everything else is on fire. So Becky uploaded. And uploaded. While the rest of us were in crisis mode.
Sorry Becky.
The last-minute save
By dinner time we had the critical functions back online. Payments working. Shipping methods working. The site actually behaving like a website.
Then it was my turn. Stock updates. Which sounds simple. But this was the most tedious work I have done in my professional life, and I spent years in this industry. I couldn't bulk-push everything at once without risking a crash. So I did it slowly. Deliberately. Product by product, batch by batch, watching the system like I was defusing something.
By late tonight, we had a functional store.
Where we are now
MU 3.0 is live. It is working. You can place your orders right now with zero issues.
What's not perfect yet: some banner links are broken. Languages still need work in a few places. There are things we wanted to have ready for today that just didn't make it through 48 hours of firefighting.
That's the honest version.
The plan this week is to fix the front-end stuff myself while I force the rest of the team to keep uploading the catalogue. Evil laugh fully intended. ^o^
Thanks for reading this far. Really. If you made it to the end you're either very patient, very bored, or you actually like us, and honestly, any of those is fine by me!
Your favorite Chobo-ajeossi
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