huge risk in the fact that we are
rolling out to boom all users yes I feel
like a team that rolls features out like
this like – everyone will have this
tendency this emotional tendency to work
for a long time on their feature like
basically I sit around in their ivory
tower and just think oh my god we need
to fix this for you users maybe if this
happens it seems like it would be like a
lot of polishing before rolling it out
because the the rollout is so for
everyone and so high risk and I imagine
that this will lead to the team having
to throw away a lot of work because what
they are building is it will take a lot
of time before it actually reaches the
users and once it reaches the users the
users gonna say this was not quite what
we wanted and since they have spent all
of this time building something that the
user might not want they have to just
throw all that away for no good reason
in order to avoid that maybe we could
roll out to just a small subset of our
users and start gathering feedback from
them let’s do that now no right so let’s
try to roll this out to just a
percentage so the default rule a
percentage roll at our Berlin so we want
90% to not get this change when you just
run without 10 10 % Save Changes and
let’s see if our mm user ends up in that
group no it doesn’t let’s actually
expand it until we see that it works
like 20 percent no 30 percent this is
[Music]
yeah yeah okay so the percentage roll
light works but just for pedagogical
purposes let’s turn
back to 10% I think that this is great
partially because it reduces risk if
something breaks it will only affect
this subset or users before we can
rolled out and also this this little
group of users can start giving us
feedback and saying about oh this is
broken this is weird and we can
incorporate that feedback into our
development process before we roll it
out to more users only think that this
will just allow us to move faster
because it’s simply less dangerous and
problematic to roll new features out you
know we wouldn’t even have to do this we
could initially just roll the feature
out to just product owners and perhaps
customer service and like our friends
not a percentage rule like just
individual users okay so the user here
that we have is their ID their key as
abc123 so this might be this is
something that we want to identify users
also that we can enter them in the in
the launch darkly interface this might
just be user IDs but might also be using
names or hmm
something like that something that we
can look up in our app and then add them
to the to the interface for now let’s
just imagine that this is fine so to the
abies now hang on we’re gonna do mpj of
course yeah that’s my user and go to
dashboard and instead of having a
percentage rollout I’m gonna save that
so now we just default rule is false
it’s not ruled out but some individual
users are gonna get it at user mpj and
we’re gonna say and let’s see did that
actually autocomplete oh it actually
autocompletes because once these have
been have appeared in the
the database or like I’ve been cold from
from the application they they end up
here so that it’s pretty handy that it
allows us to that it autocompletes
enforce very different anyway and look
at that time sorting it’s now default
for me hang on let me actually change
remove me from that Save Changes and
then refresh and now natural sorting is
the default so we can rule it out to
just individual users I’m doing a lot of
refreshing here um I noticed somewhere
in the docs while we were scrolling that
there’s a change well as well wonder if
I can just do that do that here and
update the update thing and alive let’s
see like a natural sorting and I’m gonna
change this to roll it out to mpj and
see if live updates it actually does
that’s pretty cool lets me rename this
to UM launched directly updated you like
I’m gonna put this side-by-side just did
show you that what kind of do that put
that there there okay there there and
I’m gonna remove myself and then Save
Changes and Wow okay that was very fast
that was I didn’t intend to do that that
was pretty cool
it basically allows you to have your
product owner on the phone and saying oh
we’re rolling it out now and you just
press boom and just boom updates in
their interface without them refreshing
or logging in or anything that’s that’s
pretty cool this is just a really funky
side benefit of react and launched
shortly working together also this live
update thing it’s just a I think that
this is just an another good case for
using a software as a service solution
like launch directly instead of rolling
your own it’s just all these little
things that just boom boo-boom work and
you wouldn’t be getting otherwise stuff
like the the gradual rollout with the
percentages and yeah
having like these rollouts that are for
specific for specific users that’s also
very very very nice and a little cool
things like the live live updating all
right so let’s summarize feature flex
kind of allows us to beta-test parts of
our system it’s a technique where we
hide parts of our functionality behind a
feature flag which allows us to roll it
out to a subset or users in a gradual
manner and this allows us to decouple
deployment and rollout so that we can
deal with two risky things separately it
also allows us to move faster and one of
the reasons is that we are able to roll
the feature out any time we want instead
of being coupled to deployment which is
really handy when you’re dealing with a
bunch of other teams so that you don’t
have to like sync deployments with them
we also become faster because we can
roll out our features to just the subset
of users like customer service or
product owners or our friends or just a
percentage of abusers all that allows us
to start gathering very early feedback
on unfinished versions of our features
which breaks us out of this attitude of
building the perfect product up in our
ivory tower that is it feature flagging
it’s amazing your team should do it if
you are interested in using a product to
do it you should consider using long
story you can find them at launched our
comm or in the episode description I and mpj until Monday morning stay curious