February 2017 Summaries

After a five-month backpacking trip, the author joined LaunchDarkly due to its promising growth potential, strong team, and outstanding investors. They found feature flagging particularly appealing as it allows for controlled experimentation in product development. The author's expectations regarding the team, product, and customers were met on their first day at LaunchDarkly, with an added bonus of better-than-expected snacks.

Canary releases involve deploying new features to a subset of users for early feedback and functionality verification. This practice originated from miners using canaries as air quality indicators in mines. Interestingly, some companies like People.ai push new features to their most satisfied customers (those with high NPS scores) who appreciate being the first to see new functionalities. LaunchDarkly's feature flag management allows for quick reversion to stable experiences if needed. This approach helps improve software quality and release speed by leveraging customer feedback.

Single page apps (SPA) are increasingly popular due to their ability to deliver a more fluid and faster user experience. Feature flags, or toggles, allow developers to control access to specific features in an application. However, handling state transformations in SPAs can be challenging when using feature flags. This article discusses best practices for feature flagging in React single page apps, specifically using LaunchDarkly's JavaScript SDK. The process involves integrating the LaunchDarkly client with Redux Sagas and handling asynchronous actions to request feature flags. By following these steps, developers can effectively manage access to features in their SPAs while maintaining performance and a fluid user experience.

LaunchDarkly founders, John and Dolphin, emphasize the importance of respect and integrity for their team, customers, and community. They believe in fostering a collaborative environment with leaders instead of tyrants, and creating an atmosphere where employees can learn and grow. The company values are formalized to ensure scalability as they expand. Values play a crucial role in making hard decisions, and by making them public, the founders aim to provide transparency for both their customers and team members.

The author shares their experience during their first week at LaunchDarkly, where they were quickly integrated into the team's workflow and contributed to fixing bugs and deploying production. They express excitement about joining the company after nearly 10 years at Atlassian and being part of a great culture with talented people. The author also describes a team outing to an escape room, highlighting the strong collaboration and problem-solving skills within the team.

In an interview with Josh Wills, Director of Engineering at Slack, he emphasized the importance of feature flagging in continuous deployment and learning. He started implementing feature flags at Google in 2007 and believes that not launching products frequently is scarier than deploying them continuously. Feature flagging allows for rapid iteration and experimentation, which is crucial for data science and machine learning applications. Wills prefers to call it the "experiment framework" and finds it most useful for data-driven decision making in applications. He also mentioned that while there are some cases where feature flags may not be ideal, such as switching backend systems, their benefits generally outweigh the costs. Wills believes that feature flags play a crucial role in DevOps and continuous delivery, and he hopes to see them evolve towards striking a balance between on/off switches and Turing-complete programming languages.

The author shares their positive experience during the first week at LaunchDarkly. They were impressed by the company values, product, market opportunity, and vision. Highlights of the week included attending revenue meetings, all hands meetings, customer calls, and learning from advisors. The author is confident in the company's ability to succeed and excited to partner with companies to deliver better software faster.

LaunchDarkly, a feature flag management platform, has achieved a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 50, placing it in the top tier of tech vendors. Customers appreciate its ease of use, reliability, and powerful capabilities that enable less risky releases and better collaboration between business users and developers. LaunchDarkly's customers are happy they don't have to build a feature flagging platform in-house. The company aims to improve further and has set a target NPS score of 60.

In this episode, Edith and Paul discuss the differences between working in enterprise software companies versus startups. They also talk about how much easier it is to develop software today compared to when they started their careers. Additionally, they share some of their experiences interviewing for jobs at various tech companies.

The author spent two and a half years at Intercom, where they learned the importance of pushing new products quickly and embracing failure as a means to succeed faster. They recently joined LaunchDarkly and aim to help businesses understand why continuous product delivery is crucial for gaining market share, building the best product for customers, and safely scaling deployments. The author has been impressed by the eagerness of both large enterprises and small startups to use feature flagging offered by LaunchDarkly. They are excited to be part of the team and encourage others to join them in building something that will change how companies work.