Meta question: Does launch darkly use launch darkly for new features? Or is it mostly stable or branching out into new areas (like the Android support)?
Show HN: Feature flag management for feature lifecycle control
21–25 of 25 posts
Re: Show HN: Feature flag management for feature lifecycle control
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
We do have some features to help manage the lifecycle of feature flags. For example, we can determine when a flag has been "flipped on" for everyone, and notify you that it's time to remove it. We can also determine that a flag has been removed from your codebase, and prompt you to remove it from LD ( http://blog.launchdarkly.com/launched-flag-status-indicators... ). We have more coming, including an ability to mark…
Thanks for the response. This is the confusing part for me: I've been talking in terms of Feature toggles as described by Martin Fowler: http://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html , but it looks like LD is focusing on the AB testing piece primarily, with some parts of the base toggle functionality included by default. Can there be a feature switch that is configured not based on users, but on owner/admin's…
Our goal is to build a developer-focused platform that gives teams the ability to adopt feature flags as a core part of their dev cycle-- including pretty much all of the use cases described in Fowler's article (ops, permissioning, etc.). Many of our customers are not using us for A/B testing at all.
re: conditionals, DI: our SDKs focus on the base technique (flags based on conditionals), but it's possible to wrap that core with higher-level approaches like DI, etc. We're considering going down that path, but where it makes sense to do so, and not have to re-implement higher-level wrappers for every framework out there. So, e.g.-- in Ruby, I can see us providing higher-level APIs specific to Rails.
Dependent feature flags are also an interesting problem-- we don't have a solution to that yet, but we do spend a lot of time thinking about feature flags, and I hope we'll have something on that front soon :)
Re: Show HN: Feature flag management for feature lifecycle control
#23Meta question: Does launch darkly use launch darkly for new features? Or is it mostly stable or branching out into new areas (like the Android support)?
Of course-- we have a dogfood instance of LaunchDarkly. We use LD as our plan permissioning system (the plans you see on our pricing page are managed by LD). We also use it for ops-- we migrated a key piece of our analytics infrastructure over to DynamoDB, for example, and controlled the rollout of that via a feature flag.
And of course, we'll launch new features behind a flag. I'll admit that we've had two or three occasions where we had to hit the kill switch after a deploy, so I'm rather glad we had a LaunchDarkly for our LaunchDarkly.
[edit] here's a shot of our dogfood instance: https://twitter.com/jkodumal/status/717786744750477312
Re: Show HN: Feature flag management for feature lifecycle control
#24In the spirit of the HN community feel, "Show HN" has always been about personal, side, or small projects. Never a link to a company's page.
Oh no, that's mistaken. Show HN is for something you've made that people can try out. The project can be, and often has been, a company with customers.
Weird, I don't think I'd seen a company's landing page as a Show HN before.
Though the thing I'm picking up might be more the fact that this company didn't just launch today. I.e., they're not showing us something new today. Their product has been out for, what, at least a year? So if "Show HN" is ok here, then really any company's social media person can just repeatedly post links to themselves...
Re: Show HN: Feature flag management for feature lifecycle control
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh no, that's mistaken. Show HN is for something you've made that people can try out. The project can be, and often has been, a company with customers.
Weird, I don't think I'd seen a company's landing page as a Show HN before. Though the thing I'm picking up might be more the fact that this company didn't just launch today. I.e., they're not showing us something new today. Their product has been out for, what, at least a year? So if "Show HN" is ok here, then really any company's social media person can just repeatedly post links to themselves...
No, because (a) it has to be posted by the creator and (b) they can't do it repeatedly.