oliverdavies.uk/content/node.8be3d8d9-4e73-49db-93a6-83349ac1af05.yml

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title:
  - value: 'Feature flags should be short-lived'
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      <p>Today, I <a href="https://twitter.com/opdavies/status/1767846980250714261">posted a tweet</a> with a screenshot of some code.</p>

      <p>When previously working on the <a href="/daily/2024/02/19/introducing-versa">Versa CLI tool</a>, I had a TODO comment saying "What if there are multiple languages?".</p>

      <p>Versa is a tool for standardising commands between different languages and frameworks, but some projects, like my personal website, use multiple languages.</p>

      <p>The website is powered by Sculpin, a static site generator written in PHP (so there is a composer.json file) and node to compile the front-end assets (so there is also a package.json file).</p>

      <h2 id="what-problem-am-i-trying-to-solve%3F">What Problem Am I Trying to Solve?</h2>

      <p>Depending on the language, commands like <code>versa install</code> will need to execute a different command - e.g., composer install<code>or</code>npm install` (or an equivalent node package manager).</p>

      <p>I added PHP support first, so if a composer.json file is found, the PHP command is run as the default.</p>

      <p>What I thought was for projects with multiple languages, to prompt the user to select the language when running the command if no explicit language is set.</p>

      <p>This led me to do a spike of using Symfony Console's <code>choice</code> method to see what that would look like so I could add a screenshot to the GitHub issue.</p>

      <p>Once I'd finished with the spike, rather than deleting the code, I wrapped it in an <code>if (false)</code> condition so it wouldn't be executed, but I could still re-enable it in the future.</p>

      <p>The screenshot in the tweet showed this, along with the text "Minimum viable feature flag."</p>

      <p>This is only supposed to be there for a short time until I revisit the code and implement the feature I was spiking on.</p>

      <p>If it would be a long time before I looked at it again, I'd take a different approach.</p>

      <h2 id="here%27s-the-thing">Here's the Thing</h2>

      <p>One of the main rules of using feature flags is that they should be short-lived.</p>

      <p>It's less than ideal to read through a codebase and see it scattered with feature flags that are no longer needed and were used to release a feature several months ago, but the flag hasn't been removed.</p>

      <p>A feature flag is a temporary solution for separating the deployment of code from the release of a change.</p>

      <p>Once it's been released, the flag should be removed.</p>

              
    format: full_html
    processed: |
      <p>Today, I <a href="https://twitter.com/opdavies/status/1767846980250714261">posted a tweet</a> with a screenshot of some code.</p>

      <p>When previously working on the <a href="/daily/2024/02/19/introducing-versa">Versa CLI tool</a>, I had a TODO comment saying "What if there are multiple languages?".</p>

      <p>Versa is a tool for standardising commands between different languages and frameworks, but some projects, like my personal website, use multiple languages.</p>

      <p>The website is powered by Sculpin, a static site generator written in PHP (so there is a composer.json file) and node to compile the front-end assets (so there is also a package.json file).</p>

      <h2 id="what-problem-am-i-trying-to-solve%3F">What Problem Am I Trying to Solve?</h2>

      <p>Depending on the language, commands like <code>versa install</code> will need to execute a different command - e.g., composer install<code>or</code>npm install` (or an equivalent node package manager).</p>

      <p>I added PHP support first, so if a composer.json file is found, the PHP command is run as the default.</p>

      <p>What I thought was for projects with multiple languages, to prompt the user to select the language when running the command if no explicit language is set.</p>

      <p>This led me to do a spike of using Symfony Console's <code>choice</code> method to see what that would look like so I could add a screenshot to the GitHub issue.</p>

      <p>Once I'd finished with the spike, rather than deleting the code, I wrapped it in an <code>if (false)</code> condition so it wouldn't be executed, but I could still re-enable it in the future.</p>

      <p>The screenshot in the tweet showed this, along with the text "Minimum viable feature flag."</p>

      <p>This is only supposed to be there for a short time until I revisit the code and implement the feature I was spiking on.</p>

      <p>If it would be a long time before I looked at it again, I'd take a different approach.</p>

      <h2 id="here%27s-the-thing">Here's the Thing</h2>

      <p>One of the main rules of using feature flags is that they should be short-lived.</p>

      <p>It's less than ideal to read through a codebase and see it scattered with feature flags that are no longer needed and were used to release a feature several months ago, but the flag hasn't been removed.</p>

      <p>A feature flag is a temporary solution for separating the deployment of code from the release of a change.</p>

      <p>Once it's been released, the flag should be removed.</p>

              
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