oliverdavies.uk/content/node.6fb0a429-0264-4308-9436-f1115d5b108b.yml

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title:
  - value: 'An example of feature flagging'
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      <p>I've written a number of emails about feature flags, or feature toggles, and am a strong advocate of using them whilst developing new features.</p>

      <p>I've used them a couple of times recently on my website so I wanted to share them as examples.</p>

      <h2 id="experimenting-with-presentation-layouts">Experimenting with presentation layouts</h2>

      <p>Firstly, I wanted to experiment with a different layout for my presentation pages.</p>

      <p>They currently have a list of events, embedded slides and a video recording when there is one.</p>

      <p>Each event linked to its website, where applicable, and the slides and video were from one of the most recent versions of the presentation.</p>

      <p>I wanted to change this so each event would have links to its own slides, example code or demo.</p>

      <p>I didn't want to change this yet for all presentations, only <a href="/presentations/sculpin">my Sculpin talk</a> as it's the most recent and, if I like it, later apply it to the others.</p>

      <p>My website is built with Sculpin, so adding a feature flag was as simple as adding <code>new: true</code> to the YAML front matter at the top of the file for that presentation.</p>

      <p>This is available as <code>page.new</code> in the layout file and I can use this <a href="https://code.oliverdavies.uk/opdavies/oliverdavies.uk/commit/8b721e63fb64f3c98b81353ca9cec7545d72a595">to load different markup</a>.</p>

      <h2 id="rewriting-my-css">Rewriting my CSS</h2>

      <p>Secondly, I've been wanting to re-style my website with Tailwind CSS 4 and refactor some of the templating.</p>

      <p>As this is a change I wanted to be site-wide, I added <code>new_css: true</code> to my sculpin_site.yml file.</p>

      <p>This time, I was able to use <code>site.new_css</code> to <a href="https://code.oliverdavies.uk/opdavies/oliverdavies.uk/commit/fa884644cf5aa233ad22fb28b83c5a0b150b037d">toggle the loaded stylesheet</a> and using Sculpin's environment files - e.g. sculpin_site_dev.yml and sculpin_site_prod.yml - I can be explicit about which stylesheets are used locally and for my live website.</p>

      <h2 id="summary">Summary</h2>

      <p>Feature flags are a great approach to splitting up large changes into manageable, deployable pieces, and they don't need to be complicated.</p>

      <p>Essentially, they are a simple boolean value that you can use to execute different code based on whether it's false or true.</p>

              
    format: full_html
    processed: |
      <p>I've written a number of emails about feature flags, or feature toggles, and am a strong advocate of using them whilst developing new features.</p>

      <p>I've used them a couple of times recently on my website so I wanted to share them as examples.</p>

      <h2 id="experimenting-with-presentation-layouts">Experimenting with presentation layouts</h2>

      <p>Firstly, I wanted to experiment with a different layout for my presentation pages.</p>

      <p>They currently have a list of events, embedded slides and a video recording when there is one.</p>

      <p>Each event linked to its website, where applicable, and the slides and video were from one of the most recent versions of the presentation.</p>

      <p>I wanted to change this so each event would have links to its own slides, example code or demo.</p>

      <p>I didn't want to change this yet for all presentations, only <a href="/presentations/sculpin">my Sculpin talk</a> as it's the most recent and, if I like it, later apply it to the others.</p>

      <p>My website is built with Sculpin, so adding a feature flag was as simple as adding <code>new: true</code> to the YAML front matter at the top of the file for that presentation.</p>

      <p>This is available as <code>page.new</code> in the layout file and I can use this <a href="https://code.oliverdavies.uk/opdavies/oliverdavies.uk/commit/8b721e63fb64f3c98b81353ca9cec7545d72a595">to load different markup</a>.</p>

      <h2 id="rewriting-my-css">Rewriting my CSS</h2>

      <p>Secondly, I've been wanting to re-style my website with Tailwind CSS 4 and refactor some of the templating.</p>

      <p>As this is a change I wanted to be site-wide, I added <code>new_css: true</code> to my sculpin_site.yml file.</p>

      <p>This time, I was able to use <code>site.new_css</code> to <a href="https://code.oliverdavies.uk/opdavies/oliverdavies.uk/commit/fa884644cf5aa233ad22fb28b83c5a0b150b037d">toggle the loaded stylesheet</a> and using Sculpin's environment files - e.g. sculpin_site_dev.yml and sculpin_site_prod.yml - I can be explicit about which stylesheets are used locally and for my live website.</p>

      <h2 id="summary">Summary</h2>

      <p>Feature flags are a great approach to splitting up large changes into manageable, deployable pieces, and they don't need to be complicated.</p>

      <p>Essentially, they are a simple boolean value that you can use to execute different code based on whether it's false or true.</p>

              
    summary: null
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