About this site

Philosophy of Deployment is a small project about what happens when a made thing becomes public through technical infrastructure.

Deployment is not simply publication. Publication says that a work has been made public. Deployment says that the work has been made public through an arrangement that must continue to function: files, source control, build steps, DNS, HTTPS, hosting, runtimes, update paths, logs, previews, rollbacks, and failure modes.

The guiding maxim is simple: deployment is the passage from artifact to world. A deployed thing has an address, a host, a maintenance burden, and a public promise. When the URL breaks, when the certificate expires, when a build fails, or when a platform changes its rules, the work itself is affected.

This version of the site is intentionally spare: a homepage, this about page, and one analysis post. The first task is to analyze a single deployed example closely enough that the shape of deployment becomes visible.

Questions

1. Q1What is the difference between publishing, hosting, serving, releasing, and deploying?
2. Q2When does a file become a site?
3. Q3Which version of a deployed work is the work: source, build artifact, live URL, or archived release?
4. Q4Who controls the conditions under which a project appears?
5. Q5What does a deployment platform make easy, and what does it hide?