January 2020 Summaries

Entitlements in software refer to the right to use services, products or features. They provide fine-grained control over how an individual or organization can use software and are sometimes referred to as paywalls. Feature flags, a part of feature management platforms, streamline entitlement management resulting in better customer experiences and operational efficiency. Using feature flags for entitlements allows companies to unlock additional value for customers, manage technical debt, and minimize risk. When managing entitlements with feature flags, it's crucial to start small, empower the right individuals within the organization, maintain a single source of truth, change at a predictable cadence, and audit changes.

The blog post discusses a method to reduce risk exposure by leveraging feature flags and an existing bug bounty program. It highlights the importance of integrating security into the software development life cycle (SDLC) due to the increasing number of data breaches worldwide. The application security funnel is presented, showing how vulnerabilities should decrease as they move down the funnel. Bug bounties are mentioned as a last line of defense for finding bugs and exploits in production environments. Feature flags are introduced as a tool that allows developers to manage components and compartmentalize risk by separating feature releases from code deploys. The post suggests combining feature flags with bug bounty programs to significantly reduce exposure to critical security vulnerabilities, allowing researchers to pen test changes before they become generally available.

2019 was a successful year for LaunchDarkly, a feature management platform that empowers teams across various roles to manage and control their software. The company now has over 1,000 customers worldwide and serves one trillion features daily. Demand for feature management is growing, with companies like IBM, TrueCar, and Intuit using LaunchDarkly to control their feature lifecycles, eliminate risk, and increase efficiency through development cycles. In the past year, LaunchDarkly improved its platform by adding experimentation capabilities, data export options, and support for mobile devices. The company also hosted its first Trajectory Conference in Oakland, California, featuring industry leaders discussing modern software development practices. To support growth in 2020, LaunchDarkly received an additional $4 million in funding, totaling $30 million. The company plans to expand its teams and open new hubs in London and Sydney to better serve international customers.

Trajectory, a conference for software innovators, is accepting proposals from experts in the field until January 20th. The event, hosted by LaunchDarkly, will take place on April 30th, 2020, in Oakland and aims to provide opportunities for attendees to connect with others facing similar challenges. Topics of interest include feature flagging, continuous delivery, experimentation, and more.

At the November Test in Production Meetup, Yoz Grahame from LaunchDarkly moderated a panel discussion featuring Larry Lancaster, Founder and CTO at Zebrium, and Ramin Khatibi, an experienced Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) and infrastructure consultant. The discussion covered topics such as the role of process in software development, building effective engineering teams, and the value of incident postmortems. Both experts emphasized the importance of empathy, respect for people's work, and organic processes within teams. They also shared their experiences with onboarding new team members and handling outages through testing in production.

In a Test in Production Meetup in San Francisco, Ramin Khatibi discussed strategies to minimize the impact of failure in software development. He emphasized releasing small changes often and preemptively looking for failure. Communication within an organization about the changes being made is also crucial. By doing so, teams can reduce the blast radius of failures and improve their overall reliability.

The author received feedback from their internal mentor at LaunchDarkly, emphasizing the need for fundamental business training to achieve professional goals as an account executive. They took a "General Management" class taught by Michael Dearing, which helped them develop essential skills and take on greater responsibility. Key takeaways included being authentic, using Andrew Grove's Black Box framework for predicting team performance, and employing Barbara Minto's SCQA framework for effective communication in business. The author is excited to apply these lessons and help their teammates grow.

At the November Test in Production Meetup in San Francisco, Larry Lancaster, Founder and CTO at Zebrium, discussed using machine learning to organize and detect patterns in unstructured log data. Unsupervised machine learning models can help teams find the root cause of incidents in their stack and use such insights to prevent future errors. Machine learning can aid in faster recovery from incidents and even avoid them entirely. The talk highlighted the challenges faced when dealing with unstructured log data, including format changes and the need for manual interpretation. Lancaster also shared his vision for a future where smart metrics companies integrate various types of data to perform real anomaly detection.