February 2022 Summaries

Unleash co-founder Egil Østhus highlights the company's deliberate approach to cultivating a strong organizational culture, which began with defining their core values of trust, speed, transparency, experimental, and fun. Recognizing the importance of a consistent and systematic approach, the founders broke down organizational culture into tangible elements to integrate these values into daily operations. This includes defining behaviors that align with core values, norms, and taboos, and illustrating these with examples such as trusting new employees to participate in customer meetings on their first day. Regular activities like a weekly "Happy Hour" encourage openness and collaboration, fostering transparency and trust across teams. Additionally, the company measures adherence to these values through monthly surveys and incorporates them into performance reviews, emphasizing the importance of values in driving company success. Østhus stresses the role of leadership by example, with the belief that adherence to values must begin with the founders themselves.

Unleash 4.7 introduces a new feature called impression data, which enhances the ability to track and analyze how feature flags impact user decisions. This feature allows users to listen for feature flag checks in their applications and access detailed information about the context and the flag itself. While Unleash provides basic statistics, impression data is designed to integrate seamlessly with third-party analytics services, enabling users to aggregate and analyze data in their preferred systems. Each feature flag can have impression data enabled on an opt-in basis, offering flexibility in data management and integration. Currently available for a few front-end SDK clients like JavaScript and React Proxy, this functionality aims to broaden the accessibility of Unleash data for external applications and promises future developments to simplify integration further.

Zengenti, a company known for its engaging annual hackathons, explored the use of feature toggling as a way to enhance their software development process. Feature toggling allows developers to introduce new features with an on/off switch, providing flexibility and reducing risks by enabling features to be activated or deactivated as needed. During their hackathon, Zengenti chose to implement Unleash, an open-source feature flag service they could host themselves, aligning with their multilingual programming and open-source preferences. This approach allowed them to easily integrate feature flags into their existing Python and Flask APIs, improving their ability to manage and roll back features more efficiently. The introduction of feature flags also facilitated better communication and collaboration among teams, as it allowed for centralized management of feature switches and kept all stakeholders informed through integrations like Slack notifications. Overall, this innovation has streamlined their development process, reduced stress around feature deployment, and opened up new possibilities for team collaboration and customer engagement.