Feature Flags Book: Feature Flags, An Introduction
I've been working in the web development industry since 1999; and, before 2015, I'd never heard the term, "feature flag" (or "feature toggle", or "feature switch"). When my Director of Product—Christopher Andersson—pulled me aside and suggested that feature flags might help us with our company's downtime problem, I didn't know what he was talking about.
Cut to me in 2024—after 9 years of trial and error—and I can't imagine building another product or platform without feature flags. They have become a critical part of my success. I put feature flags in the same category as I do logs and metrics: the essential services upon which all product performance and stability are built.
In 2023, I published a book titled, "Feature Flags: Transform Your Product Development Workflow". This book contains everything that I've learned over the last 7 years about integrating feature flags into my product development. But, a static book can only take you so far. In an effort to make the book more interactive, I've created a series of blog posts—one per chapter—that provide a place in which the readers and I can discuss the content. You can purchase the book and / or read a preview of each chapter on the book's mini-site. Feel free to leave a question or a comment down below.
- Of Outages And Incidents
- The Status Quo
- Feature Flags, An Introduction
- Key Terms And Concepts
- Going Deep On Feature Flag Targeting
- The User Experience (UX) Of Feature Flag Targeting
- Types Of Feature Flags
- Life-Cycle Of A Feature Flag
- Use Cases
- Server-Side vs. Client-Side
- Bridging The Sophistication Gap
- Life Without Automated Testing
- Ownership Boundaries
- The Hidden Cost Of Feature Flags
- Not Everything Can Be Feature Flagged
- Build vs. Buy
- Track Actions, Not Feature Flag State
- Logs, Metrics, And Feature Flags
- Transforming Your Company Culture
- People Like Us Do Things Like This
- Building Inclusive Products
- An Opinionated Guide To Pull Requests (PRs)
- Removing The Cost Of Context Switching
- Measuring Team Productivity
- Increasing Agility With Dynamic Code
- Product Release vs. Marketing Release
- Getting From No To Yes
- What If I Can Only Deploy Every 2 Weeks?
- I Eat, I Sleep, I Feature Flag
Reader Comments
Hi Ben,
Just wanted to check to see if you read this book as a reference? https://www.amazon.com/Feature-Management-LaunchDarkly-Discover-production/dp/1800562977
I've read your book about 2.5 times now and this is the only other big resource I've found. I know that if we aren't using LaunchDarkly, the last 1/3 will be irrelevant and I believe the first 1/3 is likely redundant with your book.
JT
@Justin,
So, I know of the LaunchDarkly book; but, made the decision to basically look at no prior art when I wrote my book. Since I've never written a book before, and certainly not one on this topic, I was afraid that reading anything like-minded books would anchor me into a position of what a book like this "should" look like. As such, I wanted to just go start to finish without any notion of what is out there.
I'm sure part of that instinct is good; and part of it is vanity. But, it seems that there really aren't many books on Feature Flags to begin with. I appreciate you giving me the low-down on what's in the book—it doesn't seem like it will be much of a value-add for me to go back now and read it.
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