Add daily email for 2024-12-19

Working iteratively

source/_daily_emails/2024-12-19.md

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+---
+title: Working iteratively
+date: 2024-12-19
+permalink: daily/2024/12/19/working-iteratively
+tags:
+  - software-development
+cta: ~
+snippet: |
+  What's the smallest deployable piece you can break a task into?
+---
+
+I recently started [self-hosting the episodes for the Beyond Blocks podcast][0].
+
+Instead of hosting the episodes on a third party service, the MP3 files are hosted on my server and played using the HTML5 audio element.
+
+The first step was to add the files to my website codebase and deploy them to the server. This was the smallest deployable iteration of this project.
+
+The second iteration was to change the player on the episode page.
+
+This is still a work-in-progress as I need to finish building the podcast feed to submit to iTunes, Spotify, etc.
+
+## Here's the thing
+
+I didn't need to wait to finish this before I could change the player, and I didn't need to do that before uploading the MP3 files.
+
+Each was its own deployable step, and this is how I like to approach tasks.
+
+I like to break things down as much as possible to find the smallest piece of task that can be committed and deployed.
+
+Deploying features iteratively is less risky that deploying everything at once.
+
+You're deploying changes in smaller parts, making it less likely for something to go wrong, and easier to identify and resolve any issues.
+
+And, if you need to roll back or revert a change, you can affect only the part you need instead of everything.
+
+[0]: {{site.url}}/daily/2024/12/18/self-hosting-podcast