engineering habits
Shipping small, shipping often
The habit that improved my work more than any framework: keep the change small enough to ship today.
For a long time I confused big with important. I’d batch up work into giant pull requests, hold features back until they were “complete,” and wonder why everything felt slow.
The fix was almost embarrassingly simple: make the change smaller.
Why small wins
- Faster feedback. A small change gets reviewed and shipped today, not next week. You learn whether it worked while you still remember the context.
- Lower risk. When something breaks, a 30-line diff is easy to find and revert. A 3,000-line diff is a crime scene.
- Momentum. Shipping something — anything — every day keeps the work alive.
A rule of thumb
If I can’t describe a change in one sentence, it’s probably two changes. Splitting it is almost always worth the extra few minutes.
Small and steady really does win.