PHP Sussex: Feature Flags – A Practical Place to Begin

This month we’re heading back to Pizza Pilgrims to welcome Peter Fox, a Senior Software Engineer at Amiqus, who will tell us all we need to know about Feature Flags (details further down).

Peter will be our first in-person speaker in a while, and this is how he introduces his talk:

“Feature Flags, Dark Launching, A/B Testing? What the hell is the difference? In this talk I will answer those questions and I’ll start to explain how you can start and evolve to potentially do all of those things.

First I’ll break down the simplest form of feature flags, using ENV variables. I’ll go into why this is a good start but will begin to fail you quickly on any medium to large scale application.

I’ll then explain why I then started to building Feature Flags for Laravel, learning to work with different persistence layers and working out the places to store and access flags in an efficient manner.

Soon we’re not just feature flagging anymore but we want to be able to dark launch and test features in production. This then requires mapping flags to users and teams. This has been the driving force for building a product like Flagfox for Laravel as a UI/UX solution. I’ll finally finish things up with a few notes on A/B testing.”

Feature flags are one of these practices I hear a lot about but never took the time to do a deep dive into, so I’m very much looking forward to this.

Hope to see you there and then!