[machinelabo]

I am not a fan of the term "ship", similar to "sell". It's a horrible term. It evokes the image of a frantic imprudent developer churning away at ball of mud trying to meet their shipping metrics and feature bloat targets.

Does anyone feel the same? If someone told me "I sold stuff, therefore I am", it just leaves a bad impression of them for me.

Build stuff with care and craftsmanship. Strive for excellence, take pride in your work and deliver, not ship.

[SiVal]

No, I remember what it meant. Once you put a product on a ship and watch it sail away, you can no longer tinker with it. You might not feel finished, so it takes resolve. Finished or not, when it sails away, you're done.

Back when software was treated as a physical packaged good, it had to physically leave your "factory" by a certain date to qualify as a sale during the quarter, allowing it to be claimed in a quarterly income filing, which would boost the stock price and, thereby, the compensation of execs and employees. So, the sales team would sometimes have to carry an armload of shrinkwrapped boxes out the back door into the parking lot to claim a sale for that quarter. It had legally "shipped". The programmers (former high school nerds) would be desperately hanging on to the code until the last possible minute--there was always more that ought to be done--while the sales team (former high school jocks) would be forcing the programmers to "hand over that disk, now, nerd!"

No courage was required by the sales team to ship. Their job was just to book the sale. In the parking lot by midnight? Hello sales bonus. But real courage (or threat) was required by the programmers, who would be forced to let go of code that could not be fixed "thru the wire" in those days, knowing that they would be blamed for every flaw that they "shipped".

[machinelabo]

Oh I remember when video games used to be shipped in that they had to finish everything. No patches later. It’s going to get burned on the ROM and off it goes sailing to their customers.

Now a days, shipping to me evokes “Fuck it, ship this shitty MVP to customers because ship ship ship” and then they wonder “Gee, why didn’t my app take off?”.

I understand the need to ship, but I never see anyone daring to challenge the frantic broken shitty app philosophy and maybe wondering if they built them with care, maybe... just maybe customers with actually come? Has anyone tried to go against the grain since the SEGA days? It’s high risk.

Thanks for a great perspective.

[paulryanrogers]

As a counterpoint, I've a janky product that I've soft launched. It's definitely a rough beta. But because of churn on the underlying platforms it'd be a constant, full time battle to polish out all bugs. Even then some quirks may never be fixed because web extensions aren't technically meant to allow interrupting all means of browser navigation.

And for me it's all a (sometimes not so) fun little side project. If I had never launched at all then it's possible no one would ever get the benefit of my unique feature.

There are similar competitors which I'd rather just buy and use, yet they don't have the one killer feature I wanted.

[fritzo]

Exactly. I see a beaming and anxious engineer standing at the railing of a wharf, watching a cargo ship slowly and unstoppably glide away to a distant port. As the engineer's scarf flutters in the wind she looks down at her trembling hands, hands detached from their creation, hands with energy and nothing to do, hands that slowly acknowledge the building phase is over. Now it's time to evaluate.

[blacktriangle]

If you change the metaphor a bit "ship" sounds good. Except instead of putting the product on the ship, the product is the ship, and once you've shipped out you now have to maintain that ship with no land in sight, supplies running low, and the crew grumbling mutiny.

[melomal]

This is what cripples most indie hacking projects. The idea that if you build it well enough the customers will come to you.

Right now, you need more selling than ever to get found and heard. Put this in perspective, even if you went down the low-touch, organic selling route of content marketing and you were building a MarTech product. You would as of my last check be competing against 2000+ MarTech SaaS all effectively blogging to the marketing department, every week. You then could switch to advertising but again, there's probably 200+ platforms already in your product area.

Slow growth is the best growth, technical debt is minimized and you can call the customer directly to learn from them what they like and dislike. Which is still considered selling and unless you 'ship' you get no feedback. I feel like people are too focused on the 'meaning' of words when really, it's sink or swim when most products launch.

[iagooar]

You can build something that is excellent, yet if you do not ship it, it will have no impact. Shipping to me is bringing a technical feature or increment to customers' hands. It is a product, yes. You sell it, true. There is nothing wrong with that if you are solving a problem or removing a pain.

[keiferski]

Steve Jobs popularized the phrase “Real Artists Ship.” He was also famously obsessed with craftsmanship, especially of the parts that weren’t seen by users.

https://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/24/steve-jobs-obsession...

[ValentineC]

It's so nice to see this article, and wonder what Apple was thinking when they were deciding what material to use for the insulation on their Lightning and (old) MagSafe cables.

Original Apple cables seem to suffer from the insulation flaking over time — and Genius Bars all around the world (I've tried, many times) refuse to acknowledge that it's a manufacturing defect.

[steve_adams_86]

I’ve always thought the term and colloquial meaning in tech arose from the need to act on delivering, otherwise one could focus on craft almost perpetually.

[valand]

I don't feel the same way. I feel that "ship" feels like a larger scaled "deliver", while "sell" feels more focused on the transaction rather than the product.

The evocation of image of frantic developers churning away might be coming from your previous experience working at or reading about that shipping culture. Unfortunately, I am exposed to that chaotic shipping culture too. I feel this disastrous shipping stories is everywhere, enhanced by the nature of software development that gets more social each day.

At the end, it is the bad practices that leads to bad shipments that we must resolve. I'm comfortable to keep the original meaning and feel of the word "ship" to separate the bad practices from it and acknowledge them as problems -- the first step of a problem resolution.

[thitcanh]

I am not a fan of the term “build”, similar to “deliver”. I’m more of a “manufacture” and “bring to life” kinda guy.

[machinelabo]

I like those better. Craft is great as well.

[quickthrower2]

I like “unleash”

[TeMPOraL]

I prefer "expose", as in "expose to radiation" - it connotes long-term suffering of the users of my work.

[quickthrower2]

Or perhaps expose as in emperor has no clothes!

[TeMPOraL]

My software does both!

[years3500]

You nitpick, therefore you are not cool.