Serve Your Software Hot

Imagine you’re running a high-end restaurant. Hungry customers place their orders, the kitchen fires up, and your chefs prepare each dish to perfection.

But instead of serving them right away, the plates sit on the counter. The food cools. The fries lose their crunch, the pasta clumps together, the steak isn’t sizzling anymore. By the time it reaches the table, it’s technically still good — but it’s not great. The customers eat it, but they don’t enjoy it as much as they could have.

That’s what happens when software teams hold back releases. They pile up “done” work — features, fixes, improvements — waiting until the release feels big enough. Meanwhile, users keep bumping into issues that have already been addressed internally, but not shipped.

I’m pretty adamant about this: release early, release often.

With Etch, we release at least once a week, and ideally every time there’s something valuable sitting in main. Especially the small stuff — bug fixes, performance gains, quality-of-life tweaks. These don’t need big announcements; they just need to get to users while they’re still hot.

It’s not just about speed for its own sake or making some “release frequency” metric look good: it’s about serving users better. The sooner improvements reach them, the sooner they benefit from them. But there’s another side to it too: early feedback.

Early feedback means learning how your decisions play out while it’s still cheap to change them. It lets you take bigger swings, because you know you can course-correct fast. It’s what turns uncertainty into progress — and it’s what increases your odds of building the right product, not just a product.

We talk a lot about building “working software”. But working isn’t enough if it’s not delivered.

Software, like food, is best served right away.
Don’t let it sit on the counter.
Ship it while it’s hot.