#flipper

We recently finished up a moderately-sized improvement to Flipper that likely would never have seen the light of day if we couldn’t have easily thrown it behind a feature flag. Being able to test drive it in production and work on iteratively helped ensure it kept moving along even though it was on the back burner in terms of priorities. 

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.