flipper VS Blazer

That’s it! You now have a fully configured feature flagging system in your Rails app. Notice we didn’t cover some more advanced features that Flipper offers, including enabling features for a user group or individual users. For that, check out Flipper on Github. We also didn’t cover feature flagging frontend features in this post - if that becomes a requirement we could easily create an endpoint that uses the FeaturesRepo  and sends enabled features to the frontend to toggle. If you learned something new consider following me here - I’ll be putting out more content on Ruby on Rails and software development as I work on Firecode.io. Preparing for a coding interview? Check out Firecode.io.

I think you are calling it Runtime Controls: https://github.com/jnunemaker/flipper/issues/162

Flipper is a gem that makes feature flags and different ways to toggle them available in Rails. It is highly modular. Apart from the main gem, you'll also have to pick a storage adapter — but more on that later. Let's use the ActiveRecord adapter for now.

Since Honeybadger is a Ruby shop, we use the flipper gem.

The next step came about when I learned more about our use of Flipper; a Ruby gem for dynamically toggling on and off features. I didn’t know when the feature would roll out, but I wanted control over the feature. I also wanted admins of other Forems to have control as well. This was trivial with Flipper. Once I deployed the code, Forem’s got the original behavior unless they turned “flipped” on the feature.

flipper with Flipper UI to enable flag management

What advantages does your gem have over Flipper?

I try to avoid these tools wherever possible, given the choice I'd always go for tools like Blazer.

https://github.com/ankane/blazer

No such luck in my current role, Looker and PowerBI are both in use by different bits of the org and nobody has the ability to delve into the underlying figures.

As u/jaxn said you could use Blazer for this kind of thing. I would also look into materialized views or custom tables and a scheduled job that calculates the metrics they care about. That will take you a long way. Eventually you can use something like Metabase but I would put that off for as long as possible as it's really expensive and pretty involved.

And it's Open Source: https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence

I'd also highly recommend Blazer https://github.com/ankane/blazer if you are into the Ruby on Rails world. It's super solid, and it's been an indispensable tool integrated to all my projects.

I use Ahoy too, but I don't have very good visibility into the data. I should spend more time building queries and creating charts. I should probably set up blazer as well: https://github.com/ankane/blazer

blazer

The Blazer gem provides a nice way to analyze the results easily. It is simple to install and allows SQL queries to run against tables. The query here shows that the candidate implementation is significantly faster than the original.