Feature Flags Book: Removing The Cost Of Context Switching

In software design, there are two types of complexities: essential and accidental. Essential complexity represents the fundamental nature of a problem. There is no way to get around or reduce this complexity as it is born of the problem itself. Accidental complexity, on the other hand, is self-imposed. It is the complexity that we unnecessarily add to the software through inexperience, insufficient planning, technical limitation, and "résumé-driven development".

When working within the confines of the waterfall methodology, the scope of the project often becomes part of the project's essential complexity. Since every aspect of a waterfall project must be developed, tested, revised, tweaked, polished, and approved before it can be deployed, product engineers are forced to hold a tremendous amount of information in their head at all times.

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/4562