You need to ship it 🚢

There is an ocean between done and shipped.

Done is pushing your last commit. Shipped is your users breaking their teeth on it.

Done feels good. 😏 Shipped feels terrifying. 😱

But done is useless.

Shipped is priceless.

You either created value or you learned.

And yes, you may piss off your users. You may end up working late to develop a hotfix.

But it’s much better to get feedback sooner than to delay trying to minimize risks endlessly.

Let’s face it. You’re probably not Apple trying to wirelessly firmware-upgrade 1 billion devices.

Ship it. 🚢 Get feedback. 📣 Make it better. ✨ Repeat. 🔁

If it sounds scary, there are ways to make it safer.

If you make it easy to ship, you will ship more often. So, automate deployments.

The more (often) you ship, the better you get, and the less risky deployments are.

If you can easily test that the main features of your product still work after a change, you won’t be afraid to push the release button. So, write end-to-end tests.

In 2023 … 18% of teams were doing CI/CD. In 2024 … 55% of teams are there.

Fantastic improvement, but 45% are still not following the practice.

If your team is a part of this group and you want to ship fast, I advocate simplicity.

You don’t need three different tools, 50 pipelines, Kubernetes, or autoscaling clusters.

Choose the leanest approach that works for you. A well-written GitHub pipeline is enough to get started.

Best regards,

Taj