You know what they say... there are 2 hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-1 errors. That's true for feature flags as well. You don't always get the name quite right before the feature flag gets used in production. But once the…
A few weeks ago I switched Box Out and Flipper Cloud to AppSignal. I've been loving it so far! The only snag I hit was cost for Cloud (not for Box Out). Previously, Cloud was using New Relic and paying around $180/mo. After a few weeks on…
Long, long ago, when I was at GitHub, the file servers were setup active-passive, with the passive replicas sitting relatively unused. In an effort to prevent them from twiddling their thumbs, they were used as the primary memcached cluster. Sharing resources like this had benefits like less cost and higher…
Feature flags are one of those things where once they click, you see opportunities for them everywhere. From managing development or analytics tools across environments to things like protecting registration or contact forms, they come in handy in endless ways. While nobody ever wants to take a registration or contact…
Releasing code behind feature flags when much of the related functionality is incomplete can sometimes require creative solutions. For example, if some new functionality requires a new column with a default value, how can we handle the scenario where the database’s default value should be different after the future…
With Flipper's new telemetry, we can see when a flag hasn't been requested in production (or any environment for that matter) for a long enough window that it's safe to remove. That creates a lot of peace of mind when cleaning up stale flags.…
While feature flags are great for managing the roll out of customer-facing features, they're capable of so much more. We use feature flags internally in conjunction with performance and analytics tools.…
Adding feature flags is easy but deleting them requires care and safety. We even mess it up. Before you delete a flag, you have to remove it from the code. If you don't remove it from the code, deleting a flag is the same as disabling it.…