I am a big fan of making smaller, more frequent commits and deploys. No one wants to review the 3,000 line diff, and deploying it generally comes with a reduced level of confidence. At least when compared with the 3 line change.
Fred Wilson wrote about doing a code deploy at Etsy and described this preference for smaller changes in a way I really liked:
Big changes create big problems. Little changes create little problems.
Of course this isn’t true for 100% of the cases, it is certainly possible for a small change to create devastating problems. What it does do is encapsulate a correct principle, that small changes are easier to reason through than large ones.
Worth printing on a poster and putting it on the wall.