Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings.

I couldn't write an issue last week because I miscalculated while traveling to Mexico and didn't bring any tools. This week we're back on track, and I hope you had a great weekend and got some rest.

The weather is cooling down. It feels like summer is over!

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Things I enjoyed in the past week

• Bun Rewrites 535K Lines of Zig into Rust in Four Months, Eliminates Numerous Memory Leaks
• Trying the Software factory pattern. by Lethain

Lately, I've been thinking about the whole point of release freezes, either deploying on Friday or Holiday freezes due to "high-risk" times.

Freezes aren't great because they just create a backlog of releases that eventually ship as a big-bang release.

The "correct" way to handle this sort of freeze is to prevent merges to trunk. And to know your release pipelines work, keep redeploying the production version daily or on a set schedule. That way, if you need to do a patch (hotfix), you know the pipelines will work in that situation.

But in practice, teams don't want to freeze merges because that totally breaks the illusion of work being done, or progress.

I guess another option is to slowly ramp releases up and down, so you do less and less as you approach the holidays, and release slowly until you're back to "normal".

In general, I think stopping releases causes more problems down the line than it prevents. But it's expected if your team is risk-averse or doesn't trust the infrastructure to find and fix a bug before customers find out.

Your turn

What do you think about Holiday Freezes? Helpful? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email.

Happy coding!