For eight long months our tiny staff has toiled away on this groundbreaking social media app, every hour feverishly imagining this very moment when we can finally unveil our Colorful creation to the world. So, here it is, the all-hands launch party where we deploy Swatchity at last. Time slows down. The music pounds through a giant pair of rented speakers as the finger of our founder Mitch inches closer to the button.

Side note: the music boring into our ear canals is an antiquated dub-step track. I don't love it, but it could be worse. I told the DJ she could play anything she wanted during the big moment except for "Celebration" by Kool and the Gang. Further side note: I've been broken-up with to that song more than once, and as a result I have bad associations with it. The actual number is five, by the way. I've been broken up with five times while this song happened to be playing. I can't be a coincidence. After the fourth one, I developed a severe facial tick every time the song came on the radio. At least once, "Celebration" was not playing at the beginning of a breakup but, for a variety of seemingly random reasons, it began playing during the breakup. If I had to think of a best/worst example it would probably be the one featuring a birthday card with its sound chip stuck so it played that cursed song endlessly as I bargained for my sanity in the alley behind a TGI Friday's. I don't like the song.

Mitch hits the button. The GitLab job starts... and immediately errors out.

"Ah, OK," says our dev-ops engineer glancing at the console log. "It's an easy fix." And thankfully it just was as easy as they said. It only took three hours to untangle the issue and re-deploy.

The party shows no signs of slowing at this point. We still have non-alcoholic champaign chilling in anctipation of the launch. Two times lucky. Here we go. For real this time. Mitch hits the button again as we nervously watch the pastel blue progress bar inch across the screen.

"We're live, I think," says Mitch in a way that sounds like a question and a statement at the same time. After pouring over the logs again, he offers a thumbs up, and we all clap heartily.

"Celebrate good times. Come on!"

Confetti canons erupt. Swatchity is up! Our lives are about to change. The world is about to change. Also, the DJ had one job and playing this song was not that.

We all pull out our phones to load up the site. Nothing. We all simultaneously check our device settings, load up other sites. Everything seems fine- except Swatchity.

The Darkness, the Fully Desaturated Charcoal Grey of Despair, begins to descend. I can feel my heart beat arrhythmically the way it did before I joined this amazing team, before I found purpose in the Colorful mission of Swatchity. The grey mist covers the room in a thick buzzing blanket of self-doubt and impotent rage. Can other people see this or is it just me?

On the 80" monitor, I can see Mitch quietly entering the CloudFront distribution address directly into the browser, and the site springs to life. Meanwhile the production domain will still not load. We all clap again, even though most of us don't know why.

"We probably need a few hours for the DNS to propagate," says Mitch, remembering that we hadn't bothered to register the domain until earlier that day. It's a testament to Mitch's leadership that he didn't sound nearly as deflated at that point as he almost certainly was.

Then, sometime around 6am, long after the sparkling grape juice and conversation had run dry, the site began to load for some of us, and we called it "launched." The Kool and the Gang track played again, and people started packing up to go home.

The sun had yet to rise, so we took comfort in the notion that it was still the same day, more or less, and that the launch had gone "well enough." Indeed, perhaps this was how the launch was supposed to go. The Colors were trying to teach us something. Maybe it was about humility. We counted it as a win.

So, after all this you may be wondering: what is Swatchity? In simple terms, it is a social media web app where you can post Colors. You can search Colors. You can message other users- with Colors. But in many ways, this description misses the bigger picture. Indeed, the true beauty, the overwhelming sublime magnificence of Swatchity, cannot be explained with mere human language. To fully grasp what Swatchity is and what it can be, we must submit to the power of the Colors themselves and follow them on the journey of a lifetime.

Register an account today, and live a more Colorful life with Swatchity!