ld-find-code-refs VS flipper

Taplytics is a broad A/B testing platform for marketing teams. While DevCycle is a feature flagging tool built for developers. Taplytics actually has feature flagging, but DevCycle is much more focused and plans to compete directly with incumbents like LaunchDarkly by building a better developer experience (more on how later). But with Taplytics they built so many features and every customer was using them in a different way that it became hard for such a small team to maintain. Meanwhile, feature flagging is a much narrower problem where most customers will have similar use cases. In addition, Taplytics required lots of face-to-face time selling to executives, while DevCycle is more of a bottoms-up, self-serve sales process. Finally, we didn't cover it in the interview but feature flagging is a huge market. LaunchDarkly was valued at $3billion in 2021.

I had a custom rule added to Little Snitch that blocked the following domains: launchdarkly.com, clientstream.launchdarkly.com, mobile.launchdarkly.com

10. LaunchDarkly

There are however Saas to implement directly a feature management system. Several solutions exist like LaunchDarkly, Flagsmith or Unleash.io. Using a SaaS (Software as a Service) feature flagging solution offers the advantage of a faster and more straightforward implementation process. These services are readily available and can be quickly integrated into your project.

Currently, there are numerous feature flag systems available. Options include our own company's open-source system, "Bucketeer", and the renowned SaaS "LaunchDarkly" among others. When comparing these, the following considerations might come into play:

A variety of tools can cover some of these use cases. PLG tools like Segment and journy.io can track activity. Maybe you use a feature flag service such as LaunchDarkly. Stripe or Chargebee might manage some of the billing-related aspects. Meanwhile, problems related to authentication might be visible in your Auth0 account. However, it’s unlikely that you’re using all these platforms. Even if you are, you probably can’t cover some use cases.

If you have not used it and wonder what I am talking about: https://launchdarkly.com/.

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?