Software Delivery in Small Batches

Software Delivery in Small Batches is a reflective software engineering show built around the hard parts of getting valuable work into production. Its center of gravity is delivery excellence, but the episodes rarely stay at the level of slogans. They move through the actual surfaces where delivery breaks down: unclear planning, brittle architecture, incident response, technical debt, weak feedback loops, and teams trying to keep flow stable under pressure. Adam Hawkins often frames each episode as a small batch of theory and practice, then follows the idea patiently. Some episodes are conversations with practitioners. Others are solo readings and commentary, especially the series on Jeffrey James's The Zen of Programming. Those readings give the show a distinctive flavor: programming folktales, wry parables, and jokes about bugs become entry points into serious points about maintenance, perspective, management, and the accumulation of poor design. The commentary is practical without flattening the subject. A bad codebase is not treated as a moral failure, but as the result of rational choices made under constraints that changed over time. Guest episodes widen the lens. Dan Slimmon brings incident response, troubleshooting, mental models, ops reviews, and the role of an incident lead into focus. Alex Nesbitt connects strategy to software work, including the difference between means-driven and end-driven approaches. Jocko Selberg appears in conversations about flow, Scrum, Kanban, Agile, OKRs, planning, portfolios, and complexity. The show also returns to architecture, including hexagonal architecture, dependency injection, testing, and boundaries that keep systems easier to change. It suits engineers, technical leads, SRE-minded developers, and delivery leaders who want to think more clearly about why teams get stuck. It is compact, opinionated, and quietly philosophical. The payoff is not hype. It is sharper judgment about the work behind shipping software well.