Change sets: a eulogy (Vimeo demo)

(The embed above is a placeholder Vimeo film, standing in the way the YouTube ids elsewhere in the demo do — the point of this entry is that vimeo: in front matter renders the Vimeo player instead of YouTube. A third option, video_file:, plays a self-hosted file through the native player.)

The talk itself: change sets deserve a fair obituary. They were slow, they forgot dependencies, they could not be diffed, versioned or rolled back — and for a decade they let a hundred thousand admins deploy on a Friday and mostly get away with it. The tools that replaced them are better in every measurable way, and this eulogy measures exactly what we lost anyway: a deployment story you could teach in an afternoon.