December 2021 Summaries

LaunchDarkly has had an eventful year with numerous updates and events aimed at improving software delivery and feature management. The company hosted its annual Trajectory conference featuring speakers from various industries, launched a new podcast series "Unintended Consequences", and released the first-ever report on the state of feature management. Additionally, LaunchDarkly revamped its branding and secured $200 million in funding to further invest in customer satisfaction and growth.

LaunchDarkly's Manager of Developer Marketing, Dawn Parzych, hosted a "Launch + Learn" discussion with Calm's staff software engineer Maya Li and Loom's engineering manager Harshyt Goel. The conversation covered topics such as managing releases, technical debt, and the feature flag lifecycle. Both Calm and Loom use LaunchDarkly extensively for their development and release processes. They discussed previous nightmare release experiences and productivity hacks. Additionally, they shared some book and podcast recommendations.

Over the past decade, software development life cycle (SDLC) has seen significant innovations with a shift from agile to CI/CD methodologies. However, the moment when new features are rolled out to customers remains stressful. LaunchDarkly aims to reimagine this last mile of continuous delivery by introducing new features such as Workflow builder for complex, multi-stage releases; expanding flag network with custom CDN integration; organizing and managing teams within LaunchDarkly; creating new experiments easily; and integrating with Datadog Dashboard for monitoring. These enhancements aim to make the software delivery process more efficient and less stressful.

LaunchDarkly, a company that prioritizes customer data security, conducted an investigation following the discovery of a significant vulnerability in Java library Log4j. They confirmed that their SDKs and container images were not directly impacted by this vulnerability. The team also conducted a system audit to remediate any potential issues within their infrastructure and will continue monitoring for malicious activity. LaunchDarkly assures customers of its commitment to following industry-recognized security best practices, and encourages them to reach out with any questions or concerns at [email protected].

The text discusses the book recommendations provided by attendees of this year's Trajectory conference. There were 21 unique suggestions across various categories such as Business, Leadership, Fiction, Organizational Change, Personal Growth, and Software Development. Some notable titles include "The Lean Product Playbook," "Start with Why," "Zero to One," "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team," "Radical Candor," "Team of Teams," "It's Not Luck," "The Phoenix Project," "Venus on the Half Shell," "The First 90 Days," "Team Topologies," "Blink," "The Bread Baker's Apprentice," "Difficult Conversations," "The Focus Project," "Accelerate," "The Clean Coder," "Designing Data-Intensive Applications," "Project to Product," "The Mythical Man-Month," and "Site Reliability Engineering." Additionally, the author shared two personal recommendations: "Feature Management with LaunchDarkly" and "Docs for Developers."

LaunchDarkly introduces its Workflow Builder in Beta, allowing users to automate complex release workflows for safer and repeatable releases. The feature enables scheduling of future rollout stages, targeting multiple segments, and incorporating multiple reviews for different parts of the release process. With this new tool, a release manager or product manager can define when a feature flag is released, how it's released, to whom, and which approvals are required. The Workflow Builder is currently available in Beta for Enterprise plan customers, with general availability coming soon.