I remember when releases were events.
There was a release manager. There was a checklist. There was a window — usually late at night or early on a weekend — when the deployment would happen. Everyone involved would be on call, watching dashboards, ready to roll back if something went wrong.
Afterwards, if it worked, there was relief. Sometimes celebration. We shipped. It was out there. Users would see it tomorrow.
Now, I sometimes forget that we've shipped at all.
The change happened gradually. Continuous deployment, feature flags, automated testing, canary releases. Each improvement made shipping less risky, which made it less notable, which made it less of an event.
Now, code merges and deploys automatically. Features roll out to a percentage of users, then more, then everyone. If something breaks, it rolls back before most people notice. The whole process happens in the background, like breathing.
This is obviously better. The old way was stressful, error-prone, and slow. The new way is calm, reliable, and fast. There's no rational argument for going back.
But something was lost, too.
When shipping was an event, it created a natural rhythm. You'd work toward a release, then release, then reflect. The release was a punctuation mark, a moment to pause and assess. Did this work? What did we learn? What's next?
When shipping is continuous, that rhythm disappears. There's no pause. There's no moment of completion. You're always shipping, which means you're never done, which means there's never a natural time to stop and think.
I've noticed teams that ship continuously sometimes lose track of what they've shipped. Features blur together. Wins go uncelebrated. Problems get fixed so quickly that nobody remembers they happened.
This isn't a complaint. It's an observation. The psychology of work changes when the milestones disappear. You have to create your own punctuation, your own moments of reflection, or they don't happen at all.
Some teams do this well. They have rituals that aren't tied to releases — weekly demos, monthly retrospectives, quarterly reviews. They create the rhythm artificially because the natural one is gone.
Other teams just keep shipping, forever, without ever stopping to notice what they've built.
The tools got better. The question is whether we've figured out how to use them without losing something important along the way.