I got it wrong the first time and probably the second time too. I’ll likely get it wrong again, so here I am writing a reminder to future me. A beloved colleague died unexpectedly. The email came the same day, evening for me, direct, no euphemisms. The video call was set for the next afternoon, late enough that people had a night to sit with it before they had to be on camera together.

Photo by Patrick Konior on Unsplash A maturity model for shipping fast without breaking customer trust. I made an earlier argument that deploying code and releasing a feature are not the same event, and that treating them as one causes unnecessary risk. That argument still holds. But the environment it was written for has changed. AI-assisted development has made writing and shipping code dramatically cheaper. A change that used to take a sprint now takes an afternoon.

It’s 5 PM on a Thursday. Something broke mid-morning and your team has been grinding on it for hours. Good engineers, working hard, coming up empty because the system is poorly documented and the people who built it have either moved on or moved teams. You’ve burned most of the day and you’re no closer to resolution. So you escalate. You ping the leads. You ask in the channel where someone, surely, knows this service well enough to point you in the right direction.