Feature Flags Book: Not Everything Can Be Feature Flagged

Once you begin weaving feature flags into your product development life-cycle, it can become hard to imagine any other way of working. But, not every type of change can—or should—be put behind a feature flag. Sometimes, the level of effort isn't worth the added complexity.

At the end of the day, anything is possible when given the necessary time and resources. But, not everything is worth the cost of implementation. Feature flags should be relatively easy to use—they should be simplifying the amount of work you have to do in order to make changes in a production application. If the path forward isn't clear, it's possible that the change you're making isn't a good match for feature flags.

And, that's OK.

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

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