Chris talks feature flags featuring Flipper (Say that 3x fast!), and Steph talks reducing stress by a) having a work shutdown ritual and b) the fact that thoughtbot is experimenting with half-day Fridays. (Fri-yay?)
Flipper (https://featureflags.io/2016/04/08/flipper-a-feature-flipper-feature-toggle-library/)
Drastically Reduce Stress with a Work Shutdown Ritual (https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2009/06/08/drastically-reduce-stress-with-a-work-shutdown-ritual/)
Iceland's Journey to a Short Working Week (https://autonomy.work/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ICELAND_4DW.pdf)
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle (https://www.burnoutbook.net/)
Transcript:
STEPH: Hey, do you know that we could have an in-person recording at the end of October?
CHRIS: I do. Yes, I'm planning. That is in the back of my head. I guess I hadn't said that to you yet. But I'm glad that we have separately had the same conversation, and we've got to figure that out, although I don't know how to do noise cancellation and whatnot in the room. [laughs] How do we...we'll have to figure it out. Like, put a blanket in between us but so that we can see across it, but it absorbs sound in the middle. It's weird. I don't know how to do stuff. Just thinking out loud here.
STEPH: We'll just be in the same place but still different rooms. So it'll feel no different.
[laughter]
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Steph Viccari.
CHRIS: And I'm Chris Toomey.
STEPH: And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. Hey, Chris, what's new in your world?
CHRIS: Feature flags. Feature flags are an old favorite, but they have become new again in the application that I'm working on. We had a new feature that we were building out. But we assumed correctly that it would be nice to be able to break it apart into smaller pieces and sort of deliver it incrementally but not necessarily want to expose that to our end users. And so, we opted with that ticket to bring along the feature flag system.
So we've introduced Flipper, in particular, which is a wonderful gem; it does the job. We're using the ActiveRecord adapter. All that kind of makes sense, happy about that. And so now we have feature flags. But it was one of those mindset shifts where the minute we got feature flags, I was like, yes, okay, everything behind a feature flag. And we've been leaning into that more and more, and it really is so nice and so freeing, and so absolutely loving it so far.
STEPH: I'm intrigued. You said, "Everything behind a feature flag." Like, is it really everything or? Yeah, tell me more.
CHRIS: Not everything. But at this point, we're still very early on in this application, so there are fundamental facets of the platform, different areas of what users can do. And so the actual stuff that works and is wired up is pretty minimal, but we want to have a little more surface area built out in the app for demo purposes, for conversations that are happening, et cetera.
And so, we built out a bunch of new pages to represent functionality. And so there are sidebar links, and then the actual page itself, and routing, and all of the things that are associated with that, and so all of those have come in. I think there are five new top-level nav sections of the platform that are all introduced behind a feature flag right now. And then there's some new functionality within existing pages that we've put behind feature flags. So it's not truly every line of code, but it's basically the entry point to all new major features we're putting behind a feature flag.
STEPH: Okay, cool. I'm curious. How are you finding that in terms of does it feel manageable? Do you feel like anybody can go into the UI and then turn on feature flags for demos and feel confident that they know what they're turning on and off?
CHRIS: We haven't gotten to that self-serve place. At this point, the dev team