[HN Gopher] Why We Ship the Most Code on Friday
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       Why We Ship the Most Code on Friday
        
       Author : dban
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2023-01-31 22:15 UTC (44 minutes ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.railway.app)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.railway.app)
        
       | pcdevils wrote:
       | Wouldn't it make more sense to count the weekend as a whole? So
       | 22 on the weekend, negating the point they're making. All an
       | incident on a Sunday says in that data, presumably is, that as no
       | one was working no one noticed the issue on the Saturday.
        
       | bradhe wrote:
       | Not shipping on Fridays in 2023 is an infrastructure smell.
        
         | pcdevils wrote:
         | Infra can make it easier to do it safer; it's not a panacea.
         | Sure you can roll back; alert based on metrics / logs / error
         | rates, but the knowledge required to automate around these data
         | points tends to require the data to already exist, which won't
         | be true with new features.
        
         | noman-land wrote:
         | To me it seems like just good, clean living. If you have to
         | deploy on Friday then you can, but if you don't have to, then
         | it just seems like a good idea to do it while many people are
         | paying attention instead of over a weekend when most people are
         | off.
        
       | marcosdumay wrote:
       | Software that is mostly used Monday to Friday doesn't get
       | incident reports at the weekend! News at 11!
       | 
       | Deploying when you have low usage has a lot of benefits. But the
       | article is convinced that the difference is really because they
       | are much better than anybody else.
        
       | boredumb wrote:
       | Shipping code on Friday is bad. Shipping things after 4PM is also
       | bad.
       | 
       | Why hire any QA? Why code review at all? All of these reduce the
       | risk of bad or unintended software being in the wild and not
       | releasing on friday or after 4pm reduce the amount of time it can
       | be in the wild without harassing people who are otherwise on
       | their off time. You can have a half dozen full time QA people and
       | a horde of reviewers merging in your request into a staging
       | instance that triggers E2E tests that complete and require a
       | manager to merge into master to be automatically deployed via the
       | same docker image into a cluster and the only guarantees you have
       | is that it may be absolutely correct and that it may have an
       | issue.
        
         | Hermitian909 wrote:
         | Hear hear. Shipping at 10am Monday-Thursday is _heaven_ ,
         | almost every single incident requiring immediate attention
         | occurs during business hours.
        
       | CobrastanJorji wrote:
       | > But following that reasoning, why not also avoid shipping after
       | 4PM?
       | 
       | Yes, exactly! Don't ship after 4 PM either!
        
         | fooster wrote:
         | Yes, only ship code to production every other Tuesday from
         | 10:30-10:30am.
        
           | forgetfreeman wrote:
           | Some folks just cannot be satisfied with a warning and have
           | to stick the fork in the outlet for themselves.
        
           | lmm wrote:
           | I worked somewhere that did that and it was great. Everyone
           | knew when the release was. If your code didn't make it into
           | this one, well, no worries, it can go out in two weeks' time.
           | And if something broke we had all day / all week to fix it.
        
             | throwaway98797 wrote:
             | sounds awful for feature velocity
        
       | mikl wrote:
       | Is it just me, or wouldn't their `git log | grep...` one-liner
       | count commits to all branches that were eventually merged to
       | master, not just direct commits to master?
       | 
       | If so, unless they always squash when merging, this just shows
       | that they have the most commits on Fridays, not deployments.
        
         | gschier wrote:
         | We do squash commits to master, so there's only one commit per
         | pull request.
         | 
         | edit: I updated the image caption to specify. Thanks for
         | pointing that out!
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-31 23:00 UTC)