April 2019 Summaries

In this blog post, Dawn Parzych introduces herself as LaunchDarkly's new Developer Advocate and explains her role in the company. A Developer Advocate is someone who speaks and writes on behalf of developers, representing their needs to the company and vice versa. Their main mission is to help developers be better at their jobs through various means such as writing tutorials, working with partners, creating video walk-throughs, speaking at conferences, and sharing insights via blogs. Dawn shares her personal reasons for becoming a Developer Advocate, including her love for teaching, helping people succeed, giving back to the community, and public speaking. She also explains why she chose LaunchDarkly as her employer due to its core values aligning with her personal values, such as inclusion and diversity, continuous learning, work/life balance, and passion for technology.

Conferences offer a rich learning environment where attendees can gain insights from speakers, fellow participants, and sponsors, extending their knowledge through recommended books, articles, and podcasts. The author, an avid reader with a substantial "want to read" list on Goodreads, highlights the value of these resources in continuing education after events like Trajectory. This particular conference featured a wide range of materials, from DevOps-focused works such as "The DevOps Handbook" and "Project to Product" to broader organizational transformation books like "Turn The Ship Around" and "Accelerate," which many speakers praised. Additionally, a curated list of articles and podcasts provides alternative learning avenues for those less inclined to read books, offering further insights into modern practices in product development and organizational strategy.

Modern development teams rely on an ecosystem of tools to support their software delivery lifecycle, including engineering, testing, deployment, and operations processes. Trajectory Conference sponsors such as Code Climate, Gremlin, Honeycomb, and Percy offer solutions for these processes. Code Climate helps visualize the engineering process and make data-driven decisions, while Gremlin provides chaos engineering tools to improve system resilience. Honeycomb offers complete observability of software and systems, and Percy automates testing to identify visual changes in applications. The New Stack publishes articles and podcasts about services and infrastructure used by modern development teams.

The article discusses the importance of cross-functional collaboration in software development teams to meet customer expectations and stay ahead of competition. It highlights Atlassian's approach of creating triads, consisting of an engineering lead, design lead, and product manager, for effective project management. Other organizations have also found value in promoting cross-functional communication using tools like Jira, Slack, GitHub, Bitbucket, and Confluence. The article emphasizes the role of feature flagging and centralized feature management systems in improving collaboration and accelerating development cycles. It shares insights from product managers at Atlassian and BrandVerge on how feature flags have transformed their organizations by providing visibility, ownership, and control over features throughout the development process.

LaunchDarkly hosted its first conference, Trajectory, which focused on better development and release practices in software development. The event included keynote speakers Adrian Cockcroft and Cindy Alvarez discussing innovation metrics and creating a healthy culture of curiosity. Breakout talks covered topics such as feature flags, continuous delivery, experimentation, chaos engineering, and more. Panel discussions featured experts from HashiCorp, Gremlin, and RedMonk. The event was well-received, with plans for future Trajectory conferences already in the works.

LaunchDarkly, a key component in customers' software development lifecycle, has achieved ISO 27001:2013 certification for Information Security Management Systems (ISMS). This follows their previous accomplishments of SOC2 Type 2 Compliance and GDPR/Privacy Shield certification. The ISO 27001:2013 standard ensures the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of LaunchDarkly's service. A-LIGN, an independent and accredited certification body, issued the certification after a successful audit process. This commitment to quality process improvement demonstrates their dedication to meeting international standards and providing reliable services for their customers.

LaunchDarkly is hosting its first annual event on April 8-9, 2019 at Oakland Museum of CA. The company sought a unique and attention-grabbing conference name that aligns with their brand and can evolve over time. A brainstorming session was held where all employees were encouraged to contribute verb suggestions, abstract nouns, fun space concepts, and other ideas. From the submissions, the marketing and design teams selected top contenders for user testing. The final chosen name will be revealed by Michael DeBiase.