This is a guest conversation episode of Ship It Weekly, separate from the weekly news recaps.

In this Ship It: Conversations episode, I talk with Evan Phoenix of Miren about why deployment is still painful, what teams keep getting wrong when they try to simplify it, and why small teams may need better defaults more than more platform knobs.

Evan is the CEO of Miren. He previously worked on Terraform Enterprise and Waypoint at HashiCorp, and he also built Puma and Rubinius.

We talk about deployment as the “final boss” of software delivery. Not because teams do not know how to ship code, but because deployment is where everything collides: runtimes, registries, secrets, networking, cloud services, databases, rollbacks, and the internal platform nobody wants to touch anymore.

A big theme is opinionated toolin ...