I was honored to give a talk at Defrag X on “The cultural changes of feature flags vs feature branching”. Feature flags initially enabled developers to separate deployment from release. Now an entire organization (product, marketing, sales, customer success) can shift from a waterfall way of thinking to a more iterative, customer- centric release. Afterwards, I was thrilled by how many people came up and said they appreciated my talk.
When I first started LaunchDarkly, I met with an Engineering Director, who was excited about feature flags but was still on a six month release cycle. That same Engineering Director was at Defrag. He's now at a different company with a quicker release cycle and is ready to move forward with feature flags. I'm happy that as release cycles get quicker and quicker, so to does the need for feature flag management.
Thanks to Defrag for ten years of great conferences, with even a bonus snow appearance.
