The Berlin Open Wireless Lab (BOWL) project at Technische Universität Berlin (TUB) maintains an outdoor WiFi network which is used both for Internet access and as a testbed for wireless research. From the very beginning of the BOWL project, we experienced several development and operations challenges to keep Internet users and researchers happy. Development challenges included allowing multiple researchers with very different requirements to run experiments in the network while maintaining reliable Internet access. On the operations side, one of the recent issues we faced was authentication of users from different domains, which required us to integrate with various external authentication services. In this paper, we present our experience in handling these challenges on both development and operations sides and the lessons we learned.