Feature Flags Book: Of Outages And Incidents
I used to tell my people: "You're not really a member of the team until you crash production".
In the early days of the company, crashing production—or, at least, significantly degrading it—was nothing short of inevitable. And so, instead of condemning every outage, I treated each one like a rite of passage. This was my attempt to create a safe space in which my people could learn about and become accustomed to the product.
What I knew, even then, from my own experience is that engineers needed to ship code. This is a matter of self-actualization. Pushing code to production benefits us just as much as it benefits our customers.
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
After over twenty years of development work, mostly web dev, I came out of retirement to take a job at a company that uses a commercial feature flag product. It was my first exposure to feature flagging. The lowering of anxiety in knowing the product could be piloted to groups and gradually introduced and as importantly, easily turned off if problems arose made this a new and welcome experience.
@Jeff,
That's awesome to hear! It really is a game changer on so many levels. One of the byproducts that I appreciate most about feature flags is the ability to enable more of a grass-roots development effort. As you say, you can pilot features to a group; but, even more so, you can pilot features for individual users. In my experience, there's no greater high than being on a phone call with a customer one day, hearing their frustration, and then the next being able to show them something small that you build for them specifically (behind a feature flag). It's just high-fives all around! 🙌
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