Build & Release Basics

How source code becomes a thing you can actually ship: what a build produces, why you version and freeze artifacts, and how the same artifact moves from dev to staging to prod.

1. What 'Building' Actually Produces A build turns your human-readable source code into a single packaged thing - a binary, a bundle, or a container image - that a computer can actually run, produced by a repeatable recipe.
2. Versions & Artifacts Give each release a version number so people can talk about it, freeze the artifact so it never changes after it's built, and store it in a registry so the exact same build can be fetched anywhere.
3. Environments & Promotion Dev, staging, and prod are separate copies of your running system; you promote the same frozen artifact through them instead of rebuilding, and feed each one its own config - which is why 'works in staging, breaks in prod' is almost always a config difference.