March 2021 Summaries

Women's History Month is celebrated in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, with its origins dating back to 1911 when the first International Women's Day was held. In 1978, it began as a week-long commemoration in Sonoma County, California, before becoming a national week in 1980 and a month-long celebration every March in 1987. Companies like LaunchDarkly have been celebrating Women's History Month by giving back to organizations supporting women, sharing personal experiences of being a mom in tech, hosting virtual movie nights featuring films about women, promoting diverse reading lists, and recognizing their own female employees.

Dark launching is a technique that allows development teams to release production-ready software features to a small group of users while hiding them from the rest of the user base prior to a full release. This process, enabled by feature flags, helps teams gather user feedback, fix bugs, and assess performance at scale. It also provides a low-risk way to deploy code more frequently. Dark launching is embraced by tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon to ensure the efficacy of their feature releases and the stability of their app infrastructure.

The author shares her experience of becoming a mother while working in the tech industry at LaunchDarkly, highlighting the challenges and support she received during her maternity leave. She emphasizes the importance of companies offering flexible work policies and paid parental leave to promote gender equality in childcare responsibilities. The article also discusses the personal growth and transformation that comes with parenthood, as well as the need for more open conversations about pregnancy and motherhood in professional settings.

The article discusses the importance of embracing change in the tech industry, particularly during times of constant evolution and shifting landscapes. It highlights reasons why people tend to avoid change, such as being overwhelmed by choices, gatekeeping, and fear of failure. To overcome these barriers, the author suggests adopting a growth mindset, not strictly following best practices, removing fear from decision-making, and fostering collective mindfulness. By embracing change and developing strategies to tackle it, individuals and organizations can adapt more effectively to new situations and seize opportunities for innovation and improvement.

A canary deployment is a strategy used in software development where new features are released to a small subset of users before being made available to the larger user base. This approach helps improve the quality, viability, and success rate of the feature ahead of a bigger rollout. The term "canary" comes from the historical practice of using canaries in coal mines as indicators of toxic gases. In software development, the pre-selected group of users helps identify bugs, breaks, and hazards of a new feature, allowing developers to strengthen it before releasing it to a wider audience. Canary deployments offer more control and confidence over releases, reduce the cost and impact of system failures, and can also help build demand for a new feature. They are different from blue-green deployments, which involve creating two identical instances of a production app behind a load balancer and routing users to the new production environment in a single shot. Canary deployments with Kubernetes can be done using service meshes or feature flags, which give developers stronger controls over deployments and remove the need for multiple production instances of an application.

LaunchDarkly has launched a public bug bounty program with HackerOne to improve its security by crowdsourcing the discovery and reporting of vulnerabilities in exchange for compensation. The company's Director of Security, Alex Smolen, believes that setting up such a program is easier than ever due to services like HackerOne, which handle communication, coordination, and payouts. LaunchDarkly plans to keep its bug bounty program running indefinitely while raising payouts as security improves and flaws become harder to find.