Simon Willison’s Weblog

How I ship projects at big tech companies (via) This piece by Sean Goedecke on shipping features at larger tech companies is fantastic.

Why do so many engineers think shipping is easy? I know it sounds extreme, but I think many engineers do not understand what shipping even is inside a large tech company. What does it mean to ship? It does not mean deploying code or even making a feature available to users. Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped.

Sean emphasizes communication, building confidence and gaining trust and the importance of deploying previews of the feature (for example using feature flags) as early as possible to get that crucial internal buy-in and feedback from other teams.

I think a lot of engineers hold off on deploys essentially out of fear. If you want to ship, you need to do the exact opposite: you need to deploy as much as you can as early as possible, and you need to do the scariest changes as early as you can possibly do them. Remember that you have the most end-to-end context on the project, which means you should be the least scared of scary changes.