Feature Flags Lightning Talk

A quick lightning talk about using feature flags in development, specifically focused around FetLife's ruby gem, Rollout.

Transcript

1. Feature Flags or “How to embrace exploring failure without people seeing your flailing.”
2. I want to build a thing
3. But I don’t want it being used right away.
4. And I don’t want it on a long lived feature branch A well recognized anti-pattern.
5. Enter: Feature Flags
6. Option 1 (good): Roll Your Own Google: “How we deploy new features github”
7. Option 2 (better): Use a library. Other people have been doing this in production longer than you.
8. Use: Rollout By FetLife (The kinky social network people)
9. Redis-backed Feature Flags Now, some code:
10. gem install rollout $redis = Redis.new $rollout = Rollout.new($redis) $rollout.define_group(:staff) do |user| user.staff? end $rollout.activate_group(:new_hotness, :staff) if $rollout.active?(:new_hotness, @current_user) # Do new, hot things here end
11. gem install rollout $redis = Redis.new $rollout = Rollout.new($redis) $rollout.define_group(:staff) do |user| user.staff? end $rollout.activate_group(:new_hotness, :staff) if $rollout.active?(:new_hotness, @current_user) # Do new, hot things here end
12. gem install rollout $redis = Redis.new $rollout = Rollout.new($redis) $rollout.define_group(:staff) do |user| user.staff? end $rollout.activate_group(:new_hotness, :staff) if $rollout.active?(:new_hotness, @current_user) # Do new, hot things here end
13. Fin github.com/FetLife/rollout speakerdeck.com/shepbook