Shipping Small Beats Shipping Perfect.

I used to hold releases until they felt finished. Finished never came.

Every extra day a branch lived, it grew merge conflicts, stale assumptions, and fear. The fix was not working harder on the branch. The fix was making the branch smaller.

The cost of waiting

A big release is a bet that nothing changed while you were away. The codebase changed. The users changed. Your own understanding changed.

Small releases collapse that bet to a day. You are never more than one day wrong.

Boring is a feature

A release nobody notices is a release that did not break anything. That is the goal, not the consolation prize.

Save the drama for the changelog.

How small is small

One behavior change per release. If the description needs the word 'and', split it.