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Notes on shipping fast without shipping garbage
A short rant on what separates engineers who ship from engineers who plan.
May 10, 2026 1 min read
The teams I’ve watched ship the fastest weren’t the ones with the most senior engineers. They had the lowest tolerance for unclear scope.
The pattern is almost boring:
- Cut the scope before you cut the corners. Decide what you won’t build before you decide how to build it.
- Ship the rough version on a real domain on day one. The first deploy is the only deploy that gets harder the longer you wait.
- Resist the urge to abstract. Three duplicate components are easier to refactor than one premature one.
- Write the migration before the feature. Schema changes are the slowest-to-reverse part of the system.
- Measure once it hurts. Don’t add observability you don’t read.
Shipping fast isn’t a personality trait. It’s the result of a thousand small refusals.