IMHO "every day" is far too frequent, and this ADHD-ish attitude is one of the reasons why the quality of average software has gone down the drain. Developers need to step back, think more deeply, and not worry about being pressured into "shipping code" that barely works. The dopamine rush of your code being shipped This frequent overstimulation leads to less ability for long-term attention. When I taught programming…
I think this would be better if it was "Do something every day". Close a bug, clean up a file, take a pass at a refactor. Set up a new monitor. Build some utility for yourself, or your work flow. Learn something. Play with some new tech and try it out. > I can personally say that the satisfaction is far bigger the longer you've persevered. I dont disagree but one can collect small joys along the way to make it easier…
But, I have adopted a ship every day rule for myself, which can often keeps me from yak shaving, which is actually a direct combat for my ADHD deep dive tendency. I love what I do and I love to make perfect code, but sometimes that's less than helpful.
One of the ways that ship every day is extremely helpful for me is in helping me with realistic time boxing.
If I'm working on a bigger module or something really complex, I'll note that in the morning and spend 15 minutes adding a new graph to the dash, or knock out a quick bug fix that's been annoying me.
While there's lots of circle jerking about dopamine rush of ADHD, for me, if I had my way, I'd go so deep and ship perfect code once a month or twice a year.
But, we also know there is no such thing as perfect code, but there is a sweet spot that gets quality code into the wild with the least possible amount of time working speculative edge cases.
Looking at my stack and deciding if I'm going to ship my main project today or take a 15-30 minute warm up bug/push thing, has been extremely useful for me and I end up with better small single function commits, and pushing working code with a slot for the edge case. I still do the edge case before we go to prod, but my projects move a touch faster, I don't rabbit hole and my bus factor is quite a bit lower.