February 2021 Summaries

Black History Month is celebrated annually in February to recognize and honor the achievements of African Americans and their central role in US history. Carter Godwin Woodson first established Negro History Week in 1926, which was later expanded into Black History Month by President Gerald Ford in 1976. LaunchDarkly has organized a series of events during February to celebrate black history, including donating and volunteering for the Bay Area-based organization Black Girls Code, sharing internal doses of black historical facts and figures, hosting weekly giveaways of tech-focused books written by black authors, and showcasing movies highlighting struggles and accomplishments throughout black history. The company's efforts aim to raise awareness about racial disparities in the culture and inspire future generations to make a difference in their respective industries.

Gremlin's 2021 State of Chaos Engineering Report reveals that feature management is crucial to safer deploys and minimizing the impact of failures in software development. The most common causes of incidents are bad code pushes and dependency issues, with top-performing organizations using circuit breakers and selective rollouts to maintain high availability. Monitoring plays a key role in identifying anomalies and ensuring optimal feature performance. Feature flags enable testing in production and allow for quick disabling of features if problems arise after deployment.

LaunchDarkly has released its Erlang SDK in general availability, allowing users to manage features in massively parallel services, distributed services, and multi-server applications built with the language. Erlang is known for its fault tolerance and was originally created by Ericsson before being open-sourced in 1998. LaunchDarkly's feature flags empower teams to safely deliver and control software without fear. The platform supports over 20 trillion feature flags worldwide on peak days and offers SDKs for more than 20 languages and frameworks across server-side, client-side, and mobile environments. The Erlang SDK also extends support to applications built with Elixir and the Phoenix framework. Users can access a reference guide for getting started with the Erlang SDK and learn about embedding it in their application, viewing open-source code, and running sample applications.

Blue-green deployments are an application release strategy that involves creating two identical instances of a production app behind a load balancer, allowing updates to be made without any downtime. This deployment process ensures safety in your releases and enables more frequent and confident deployments. Benefits include reduced downtime, less stress on the engineering team, and increased competency in releasing. However, there are some drawbacks such as complexity in infrastructure and deployments, as well as cost considerations. Feature flags can be used alongside blue-green deployments to provide additional safety at the feature level. Ultimately, choosing a deployment strategy depends on your specific needs and trade-offs.

In a recent webinar, Gene Kim discussed the significant impact of the pandemic on digital transformation across organizations. Despite many companies' plans being disrupted, the crisis accelerated digital transformation at both the organizational and industry levels, with long-lasting effects. As remote collaboration and adoption of advanced technologies became crucial for survival, businesses had to adapt quickly. The agility gained during this time is expected to change how work is performed in the future. Looking ahead to 2021, Gene Kim highlighted the importance of boosting security in response to recent hacks and making it a priority earlier in the development process.

The text discusses the use of feature flags in software development and presents two humorous poems written by team members to celebrate Valentine's Day. Feature flags are a technique used to control the release of new features in applications, allowing developers to manage their deployment more effectively. The poems emphasize how feature flags can reduce deployment time and increase efficiency for teams.

LaunchDarkly is hosting its inaugural user-conference, Galaxy, on April 6 and 7. The event will feature intensive user training on the first day, followed by interactive presentations from LaunchDarkly customers on the second day. Attendees will learn about using the platform effectively, emerging use cases for feature management, and tips and tricks to enhance their abilities. A limited-capacity workshop called Space Camp: Feature Management 101 will be offered, which includes a voucher for a certification exam. The event is free for registered attendees, with the exception of the fee-based Space Camp workshop.

In episode 59 of "To Be Continuous," Edith and Paul discuss the mobile gaming economy, corporate monopolies, and the importance of monetization. They also touch upon Pink Floyd's music and Mozilla's recent layoffs. The conversation covers various topics such as Apple's app store policies, Android's role in gaming, and Google Cloud's database offerings. Edith and Paul debate on whether Apple is a benevolent overlord or not, and discuss the impact of monopolistic practices by tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

In 2021, while many people are still spending time at home due to the pandemic, it's a great opportunity for experimentation and continuous learning. One useful tool is feature flags, which can be used in various ways such as deploying your first flag, conducting canary tests, configuring triggers with observability and alerting tools, offering self-provisioning to sales engineers, setting up approval workflows, scheduling automated changes, configuring load shedding, running experiments, testing in production, migrating from on-prem to the cloud, setting up circuit breakers, streaming raw event data into a data warehouse, rate limiting APIs, assigning tickets based on support engineers' capacity, managing entitlements, integrating feature flags with other tools, running chaos experiments, managing alternate process flow, managing your beta program, running user testing with target candidates on live prototypes, and more. By effectively using feature flags, one can reduce risk, iterate faster, and gain more control in their development cycles.