One of the fastest ways to grow as a developer is to ship tiny features often, instead of chasing a giant “version 1.0” that never leaves your laptop.

This post is about that rhythm: build → ship → observe → refine.

Small deploys, small blast radius

When you ship something small, you get a few superpowers:

• Easier debugging – if something breaks, you know which change did it.
• Safer experiments – you can test ideas without gambling the whole app.
• More feedback loops – users (or future you) see progress quickly.

Example of a simple error screen you might hit in the browser:

Instead of panicking, treat it like data:

• What URL was hit?
• What action did the user perform?
• Which commit introduced this change?

A tiny feature, implemented with care

Here’s a small function that could power a feature flag or toggle in your app:

function isFeatureEnabled(flags, key, fallback = false) {
  if (!flags || typeof flags !== "object") {
    return fallback
  }

  if (!(key in flags)) {
    return fallback
  }

  // Coerce to boolean but stay predictable
  return Boolean(flags[key])
}

// Example usage:
const flags = { newDashboard: true, betaSearch: 0 }

isFeatureEnabled(flags, "newDashboard") // true
isFeatureEnabled(flags, "betaSearch") // false (0 becomes false)
isFeatureEnabled(flags, "unknownFlag") // false (fallback)