From Stock Markets To Ledgers, Part V: Continuous Deployment

I'm the Andrew Hiller of software releases

Andrew Hiller, self-proclaimed “Fittest Youtuber on Earth”

This one is going to sound like a pep talk.

I seem to find no way around it: whenever I argue that you, or your team, should be deploying code changes to production every day, I get crap for it. “It’s because you have no idea what my team is doing”, they say, “and that’s why what you’re saying doesn’t apply to me. Clown”.

So I’m going to try a new approach: Andrew Hiller’s.

If you don’t know Andrew Hiller, he is a youtuber in the CrossFit space that became famous because he was calling out famous athletes for breaking the rules.

This is a very controversial topic. Every year, thousands of athletes enter the CrossFit Open to become one of the 40 men and 40 women who qualify to compete at the CrossFit Games. But this doesn’t happen in a central venue. Athletes submit their scores, along with videos of them doing the workouts. Some judge is meant to validate the score, and the top athletes go to compete in the Games.

This is all public, and for a long time nobody paid much attention to the thousands of videos uploaded on Youtube. Probably not even the judges either.

Enter Andrew Hiller.

CrossFit, at least in theory, is a sport in which standards are very strict. Its main youtube channel is filled with 1-minute long videos explaining even the most basic of movements: the burpee, the lounge, the pushup, the squat. Even the box step up, which is exactly what you think it is, has a video.

In the burpee, you’re meant to jump at the end. In the lounge, your knee has to touch the floor, and then extend on top. In the squat, your hips must go deeper than the knee. And so on.

In practice, though, people tend to be very lenient when it comes to call a rep valid or not.

So what if I just squat deep enough for hips to go almost as deep as knee height? That’s a normal train of thought when you’re doing 100 of these.

Plus, you’re not competing to win anything, right? So why being so strict? What’s the point of calling out 65+ year olds who just want to be part of the fitness community? Shouldn’t we celebrate the fact that they’re working out instead of sit in their couch all day?

Hiller has none of it. When you step into the competition floor, the rules are The Rules.

The reason CrossFit is very strict when it comes to movement standards is because one of the main tenets of the sport is being able to accurately measure your own improvement. In CrossFit, you don’t do legs Mondays and Thursdays and upper body Tuesdays and Fridays; every day is something different. Workouts are also scored: you’re competing either to get a certain amount of reps for time, or to get the maximum amount of reps on a specific time span.

Eventually, you get to repeat the workout, and that’s when you compare your old score with the new one. CrossFit’s promise is that the newest score is going to be better.

But if you’re cheating the movement standard, you can’t be certain of your actual progress.

Say you’re running a marathon. But you’re allowed to use your bike at some random point, for a random amount of time. And then, you get to do that again six months later.

Would you be able to tell if you’re a faster runner?

You wouldn’t. That’s why Hiller is calling people out.

But the most important reason for doing so is because the movement standards are more difficult, and demand more mobility and strength from you. Over time, especially if you’re that 65 year old lady, and you don’t squat deep enough, you're training your muscles to get shorter, because they don’t get the right stimulus.

With every no rep, you’re not only cheating yourself. You’re actually harming your body.

This, however, isn’t a fitness newsletter. And I’m not trying to convince you to become a Crossfitter. The reason I’m bringing up Andrew Hiller is because I see tons of parallels between the excuses of people who don’t follow CrossFit standards and the engineers who don’t deploy their code changes every day.

“Finally”, you might be thinking, “I see where all of this is going”. Even if you don’t agree with it.

So let me cut to the chase: you might not be uploading a video of you saying that you’re not going to deploy this Friday because, well, it’s a Friday.

And I’m going to say that you’re only embarrassing yourself.

You’re the old lady who can’t squat.

I’m Alvaro Duran, and this is The Payments Engineer Playbook. I’m not kidding, this is a newsletter targeting, not CrossFit athletes, but software developers building the systems that move money around.

This article is part of the series that I’ve called From Stock Markets to Ledgers, where I’m tracking a few fundamental ideas that people building stock exchange technology have figured out, but the wider fintech community hasn’t.

And this week, I’m talking Continuous Delivery. Which, to me, it just means “deploy to production every day”.

In this article, we’re going to look at

• The 3 most common excuses people often make to avoid deploying daily

• All the counter arguments

• And one all-encompassing reason why you haven’t acted on any of this yet.

Unlike the Accelerate book, I’m not going to “appeal to science” by mentioning surveys and statistics. You’re probably familiar with this line of research (even if vaguely), and it hasn’t moved a needle in your world.

Instead, I’m going to follow a line of reasoning similar to Andrew Hiller’s: I’m going to lay down why you’re embarrasing yourself with lame excuses, that deep down you know they’re excuses. And that, like people who don’t squat deep to go faster, you’re actively harming your personal growth in the process.

If you want the softer, free-to-read version, I wrote about how Stripe deploys 1,000 times every day.

Stripe Deploys 1,000 Times A Day And You Don't Deploy On Fridays

But if you need something stronger, then let’s dive in.