Feature Flags Book: Build vs. Buy

As engineers, we love to build! As such, it's completely natural to learn about feature flags and then think, "Yeah, I could build that." And, in fact, we did build a very simple implementation earlier in this book (see Going Deep on Feature Flag Targeting). But, building your own feature flags system is probably not a great use of your time (or your company's time).

Feature flags are deceptively simple. So much of what we see—the branching logic within our application code—is just the tip of the iceberg. There's much more below the surface that goes into keeping your feature flags available, reflecting configuration changes in near real-time, and allowing your team to manage feature flag state across multiple environments.

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

Short link: https://bennadel.com/4555