March 2017 Summaries

The author has recently joined LaunchDarkly after spending two years in the consumer space at Good Eggs. Their first week was filled with excitement and challenges as they got acquainted with the development process, met the team, and began to understand the product's evolution. They were particularly impressed by how feature flagging can impact organizations and improve user experiences. The author is eager to work on this empowering product alongside their incredible team and contribute to LaunchDarkly's future growth.

The text discusses the author's experience in agile development, highlighting the importance of communication between technical and non-technical teams to mitigate risks and improve project outcomes. It mentions various tools and processes that have been developed to enhance predictability in software development but emphasizes the need for better alignment between engineering and business sides. The author introduces LaunchDarkly as a platform that enables companies to bridge this gap, allowing non-technical stakeholders to participate more actively in decision-making processes.

SoftTechVC recently hosted a panel with professional football players discussing the importance of grit, determination, hustle, and mental toughness for athletes to excel. The conversation touched on rigorous training schedules, sacrifices made by players, and their motivation to provide better futures for themselves and their families. After the panel, an investor named Ronnie engaged in a discussion about software development trends with the author. It was revealed that these football players are also investors in SoftTechVC, using their earnings from professional sports to support entrepreneurial ventures like LaunchDarkly. The founder expressed gratitude for their trust and investment in the company's mission.

LaunchDarkly has introduced the ability to edit multivariate feature flags, allowing users to manage variations like strings, numbers, JSON objects, and arrays. Previously, once a flag was created, its variations could not be edited or deleted. Now, users can add, edit, and delete variations for multivariate flags after creation, as well as modify their values, names, and descriptions. This update enables more dynamic control over feature flags in applications such as e-commerce, configuration management, and CSS styling. Changes to flag variations apply across all environments within a project.

E-commerce applications are increasingly popular and modern front-end frameworks like Angular and React enable the creation of fast and responsive single-page apps. Feature flags can be used in e-commerce environments to provide granular control and feature visibility, allowing for controlled rollouts of new features, personalized shopping experiences, and promotion management. In this article, an open-source Angular application demonstrates the power of feature flagging in an e-commerce context using LaunchDarkly's JavaScript SDK. The integration involves creating a service to initialize the LaunchDarkly client and setting up a listener for changes in feature flags, allowing dynamic updates to the app's content. This approach provides a safety net for managing discrepancies in pricing and discounts. The code is available on GitHub for further exploration.