This is the second post in a short series about shipping small, fast-moving web projects.
In the previous post, we used a hackathon-style scenario: a static submission page needed a public link under time pressure.
The point wasn’t a specific number of seconds.
It was context.
The Default Is “Treat Everything Like Production”
Modern development culture has normalized a default workflow:
- Git repository
- CI configuration
- Automated deployment
- Hosting + environment decisions
Even when the “project” is:
- A temporary landing page
- A frontend-only demo
- A hackathon submission
- A two-day experiment
That default isn’t wrong.
It’s just often unexamined.
A Simple Lens: Lifespan × Risk
Before reaching for a pipeline, it helps to ask two questions:
1) How long will this live?
2) How costly is failure?
The goal is proportionality: the smaller the project, the smaller the ceremony.
Three Categories of Projects
1) Long-Lived Systems (High Risk, High ROI)
Production SaaS. Team-owned services. Revenue paths.
You want CI/CD here because you need:
- Repeatable builds
- Rollbacks
- Monitoring + alerts
- Change control
This is the world pipelines were built for.
2) Medium-Term Projects (Moderate Risk)
Portfolios, docs sites, internal tools.
Automation helps — but the “pipeline” should stay proportional:
- Minimal steps
- Few moving parts
- Low maintenance overhead
3) Short-Lived, Fast-Moving Static Projects (Low Risk)
Hackathon demos. Temporary pages. Frontend-only prototypes.
These projects often:
- Live for days or weeks
- Don’t have a backend
- Don’t need environment variables
- Mostly need one thing: a public URL
Example output page:
This is what a published static demo page looks like on MyVibe.
And yet we often deploy them like production systems.
The Hidden Cost: Attention
For small projects, the cost of over-engineering isn’t money.
It’s attention.
It’s switching from:
Improve the demo
to:
Configure the pipeline
That context switch introduces friction.
And friction slows iteration.
Quick Rule of Thumb
If the project has users who depend on it, needs rollbacks, or has secrets/configuration, use CI/CD.
If it’s a static demo page with no backend and no env vars, optimize for “publish a link” instead.
A Category Worth Optimizing
There’s a category of work where publishing should feel lightweight:
- Static
- Self-contained
- Short-lived
In that context, the best workflow is often:
run one command → get a link
In the final post, I’ll walk through the workflow behind that one-command publish — and the constraints that make it possible.
Series: Shipping Small Projects
- We Built for 36 Hours. Publishing Took One Command
- Not Every Project Needs a Deployment Pipeline
- From Folder to Public URL with One Command
Top comments (1)
Agree so much!