#feature flags

I’m very bullish on the potential of feature flags, but I’d be remiss not acknowledging that they also introduce potential issues that require caution. I even got tripped up with a small oversight, but these are the kinds of mistakes that help reinforce that some basic guardrails can help. Fortunately, that’s precisely what we’ve been working on. 

Wrote up some details about how we used feature flags to add the Free Cloud option (a large, far-reaching change) to Flipper over the course of about 20 pull requests and releases. 

…feature flags are about letting teams separate the process of releasing new features from the process of shipping code. When shipping code, frequent small changes reduce risk dramatically, but for features, we often need a large amount of code to change all at once. With these two elements at odds, de-coupling one from the other enables better workflows at every step of the process.

It helped maintain steady momentum at at time when none of us were working full-time on Flipper. We were able to catch smaller issues earlier, and once it was finished, we even flipped the switch on a Friday afternoon without any major problems.

I’ve been working part time with John, Brandon, and Steve on Flipper Cloud the last few months, and then we decided to make it a full-time thing. We’ve been working on a ton of stuff to make feature flags more powerful and less painless to manage, and cutting 1.0 and offering a free plan for Cloud is just the first step.