October 2016 Summaries

LaunchDarkly introduces Slack and HipChat integrations, enabling seamless communication between product, engineering, and business teams for faster, more coordinated releases. The integration allows users to receive notifications about feature flag activities such as on/off toggling, rollouts, modifications, and deletions. Custom policies can be set up for granular control over the types of notifications sent to specific chat rooms. This helps in better coordination during releases and keeps everyone informed about changes going live.

Feature flags or toggles have evolved from simple on/off mechanisms to multivariate tools that enable developers to serve dynamic values such as strings, numbers, JSON objects, and arrays. This has opened up a new world of application management possibilities. Multivariate feature flags allow for customization in the number and type of variations returned. Use cases include managing features in pricing plans, personalizing user experiences, controlling CSS styling, and managing conditional logic separately from code base. Serving dynamic values can be achieved by calling a variation method to determine which variation the user should get based on their attributes. Feature flags are best used for personalized feature targeting without tying that logic into the codebase, allowing rapid changes in pricing models, testing color schemes, and configuring complex features without redeployment.

In this episode of To Be Continuous podcast series, Edith Harbaugh and Paul Biggar discuss the pros and cons of working with specialists vs. generalists in software development. They talk about how specialization can impact a product or company, touching on topics such as full-stack engineering, industrialization, and the role of dev ops. The hosts also delve into the stages of VC financing and how they relate to specialization within a startup.

LaunchDarkly has launched two new integrations with Atlassian, enhancing control over production rollouts through Bitbucket Pipelines and HipChat. Feature flagging is a method of gating functionality to gain better control over releases, allowing for targeted segmentation, feedback gathering, and easy rollbacks without redeployment. LaunchDarkly's integration with Atlassian allows teams to create and enable feature flags via Bitbucket Pipelines, providing more control during release and reducing risks. Additionally, the HipChat integration offers real-time visibility into all feature flag changes within a team's collaboration tool, streamlining communication and workflow management.