CalVer Release Ceremony: Ship with Confidence

Our 7-step release pipeline — from RC branch to production deploy with zero-downtime verification.

March 24, 2026 · 1 min read

Why CalVer

Semantic versioning assumes you know the magnitude of your changes. We don't — we ship weekly. CalVer (Calendar Versioning) gives us 2026.03.0, 2026.03.1 — it's honest about when code shipped, not how big the change was.

The 7-Step Ceremony

  1. RC Branch — Cut rc/2026.03.x from main
  2. Test Suite — All unit and integration tests must pass
  3. Local Deploy — Docker build, run locally, manual smoke test
  4. Go/No-Go — Human decision gate. No automated bypasses.
  5. Merge + Tag — Merge RC to main, tag with CalVer
  6. Production Deploy — GitHub Actions pushes to Azure Container Apps
  7. Health Check — Hit every endpoint, verify response codes

The Human Gate

Step 4 is the most important. The Go/No-Go gate is a deliberate pause where I review what's shipping, check the diff one more time, and make a conscious decision to release. Automation handles the mechanics; humans handle the judgment.

Sprint Review as Content

After each release, we interview ourselves about what shipped. Those interviews become dev notes — the content you're reading right now. Shipping creates content creates SEO creates leads. The flywheel turns.

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