Ben Tatum

Why Ship It?

The "Ship It" series serves as a reminder of why I'm doing what I'm doing. Just like the "Weekend Project", the goal is to create and deliver value to customers as quickly as possible. The title is just less specific. I'll still try to publish more weekend projects, but sometimes I only have an hour or two during the week. The kids are keeping me super busy on the weekends!

When developing a product, service, or even just adding to it, especially in software, it's crucial to keep things small for effective delivery. By "small", I mean manageable tasks or features that can be completed quickly. Time and attention can easily be diverted elsewhere. Therefore, it's important to create and deliver small increments of value quickly.

"Do Things That Don't Scale"

As I transitioned to my new role at Teaching.com last week, updating my homepage was a priority. I was reminded that my blog needed some help due to posts on the home page becoming increasingly unwieldy. I considered various content management solutions. I had to resist the urge to over-engineer this. All I really needed was to declutter the homepage and create a separate page for my blog posts. So I decided to keep everything hardcoded for now.