Shipping is a muscle

The job of running a company is to make decisions about software without touching it. I got good at the decisions. Somewhere in there I lost the feel for the difference between a clean change and a clever one, and I started trusting the people who still had it.

Coming back, the surprise isn't that I'm rusty — I am — it's that the ground moved. The editor argues with me now. I describe what I want, watch a draft appear, and spend my time on the thing I was actually good at: deciding what's worth keeping.

That turns out to be most of the job. Taste didn't expire. The muscle that did was shipping. So I'm training it the boring way: something small, finished, in public, every week.