Always be shipping.
Always be shipping.
The change from gardener to shipper has focused my efforts onto only the things that genuinely matter in my projects, increasing speed, and deliverables in less time for less effort.
“Ship it, Just ship it! ” - Shia LaBeouf probably
For years as a software engineer I have had personal side projects, some big some small and yet I always ended up spending a lot of time on the smallest details and didn’t actually complete anything. For the most part this was because these projects were more meant to develop certain skills more so than to actually deliver any actually completed project. This is obviously an approach that doesn’t scale well to professional work, and I was always able to deliver enough work in a reasonable amount of time. However I could find myself spending all of the either self or team allotted time on the given task to make it as good as I possibly could. While this approach didn’t always end in late projects or under delivering my work, it didn’t prevent things from going past timelines and due dates passing. However a few years ago working as a consultant I made a shift in perspective that I credit with being the best thing for my career and performance. Quite simply any code that isn’t delivered isn’t worth anything, so it is best to focus on the exact needs and deliver them as quickly as possible without taking on more tech debt then is sustainable.
“Put that coffee down!! Coffee's for shippers only.” - Glengarry Glen Ross probably
Even though the new approach explicitly allowed for tech debt or the need to rework things from time to time, the focus on delivering meant that I would often deliver so much work, so much faster that I would be able to iterate on any given issues multiple times and each iteration would yield improvements that would not have been possible without seeing the delivered work actually perform and actually run. This is essentially just agile methods applied, and it works. When you focus on what can be measured, what can be delivered, and what will bring the most value to your stakeholders and your team. You can spend your time more wisely and impact-fully. I’ve been meaning to start a blog for years, I’ve built sites that were impressive but never able to be delivered and deployed do to various issues that arose from choices that I had made earlier in the project rather than getting things out as quickly as possible. While I’ve gotten this working blog out and deployed within the first day of starting on it. Was it populated by Lorem Ipsum articles and leftovers from its template? Yes, but it was also working, using a CICD pipeline that was practical and allowed me to shake out every issue before getting too far down for them to be easy fixes. This site will develop in many ways, but each iteration will make it closer and closer to the site that I want it to be, and it’s actually live.