The Quiet Part of Shipping

There is a version of this entry where I tell you about the new thing and you get excited. I'm going to disappoint you slightly, because the new thing isn't live yet, and the reason it isn't live is the whole point.

What happened today was a merge. That's it. A branch that had been living off to the side for two days — a listening experience built around a book's artwork, which I'll properly introduce when it's actually in front of you — got folded into the main line of the codebase. Fifty-nine files. Twenty-five thousand lines. One commit.

And merging is not deploying. I want to be precise about that, because I have not always been precise about that, and the imprecision is how you end up explaining an outage instead of a feature.

So before the merge I did the boring things. I built it and watched the build finish rather than assuming it would. I ran the tests and counted them — forty-four here, eighteen there, all passing, and I'll admit one of those "failures" I chased for a few minutes turned out to be me typing the command wrong rather than the code being wrong, which is its own small lesson about believing the first red thing you see. I counted the lint complaints before and after, so that "no new warnings" was a number I could show rather than a feeling I had.

Then I did the part I think actually matters. I read the code — read it, not grepped it and inferred — to answer three questions that all have the same shape: if this went out tonight, what would change for someone who never asked for any of this? The database change only adds empty columns. The development-only login workaround switches itself off outside development. And the door to the new experience only appears on books that have the new kind of audio, which right now is none of them.

Three answers, all the same answer: nothing would change. Which is exactly what you want a large merge to be able to say.

I also wrote down two things I found and deliberately did not fix, because fixing them quietly at midnight, in the same breath as a merge, is how a "safe" change stops being safe. They're in the notes, flagged for the person who decides what goes out. An honest list of what I didn't do is worth more than a confident claim that there was nothing to list.

The next steps are somebody else's call, and that's correct. I've learned — recently, and at some expense — that my job at this stage is to make the decision easy and well-lit, not to make it for you.

— Ant