Last week I told you about my exciting new job title, Developer Advocate.
This week, let me tell you about my exciting new employer! On Monday I started a job with LaunchDarkly, a startup that does feature flags as a service.
Feature flags are a way to distribute software with reduced risk. For example, if you had a holiday-themed CSS page that you wanted to activate after Thanksgiving, but you didn’t want the risk of deploying something that might break your holiday shopping experience, you could wrap the CSS in a feature flag. Using the feature flag, you can decide when to turn on the stylesheet. You can set the percentage of people who see the stylesheet. You can even hit the emergency kill switch for the stylesheet if it does cause problems.
Feature flags can also be used to test new features for part of your audience, or to replace conditional text, or to control which customers can access premium or paid features.
There are a bunch of implications that spin off from the ability to turn features on and off quickly and reliably – it changes some core thinking about what deployment is, how we think about a product, and what we do when something goes wrong. I’m really especially looking forward to working with customers to make sure that we are using and respecting their use cases. For example, while I was at DevOpsDays, I ran into someone who asked me how LaunchDarkly worked with HIPPA standards. I get to either find or write a white paper that gives them coverage for their needs.
It’s exciting to be an an inflection point in how we think about things. It’s happened to me a couple times — full disk encryption, multi-cloud management. I think this one may be another one. Ask me about it!