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

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    "title": [
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            "value": "Feature flags should be short-lived"
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            "value": "\n          <p>Today, I <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/opdavies\/status\/1767846980250714261\">posted a tweet<\/a> with a screenshot of some code.<\/p>\n\n<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>\n\n<p>Versa is a tool for standardising commands between different languages and frameworks, but some projects, like my personal website, use multiple languages.<\/p>\n\n<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>\n\n<h2 id=\"what-problem-am-i-trying-to-solve%3F\">What Problem Am I Trying to Solve?<\/h2>\n\n<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>\n\n<p>I added PHP support first, so if a composer.json file is found, the PHP command is run as the default.<\/p>\n\n<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>\n\n<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>\n\n<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>\n\n<p>The screenshot in the tweet showed this, along with the text \"Minimum viable feature flag.\"<\/p>\n\n<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>\n\n<p>If it would be a long time before I looked at it again, I'd take a different approach.<\/p>\n\n<h2 id=\"here%27s-the-thing\">Here's the Thing<\/h2>\n\n<p>One of the main rules of using feature flags is that they should be short-lived.<\/p>\n\n<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>\n\n<p>A feature flag is a temporary solution for separating the deployment of code from the release of a change.<\/p>\n\n<p>Once it's been released, the flag should be removed.<\/p>\n\n        ",
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            "processed": "\n          <p>Today, I <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/opdavies\/status\/1767846980250714261\">posted a tweet<\/a> with a screenshot of some code.<\/p>\n\n<p>When previously working on the <a href=\"http:\/\/default\/daily\/2024\/02\/19\/introducing-versa\">Versa CLI tool<\/a>, I had a TODO comment saying \"What if there are multiple languages?\".<\/p>\n\n<p>Versa is a tool for standardising commands between different languages and frameworks, but some projects, like my personal website, use multiple languages.<\/p>\n\n<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>\n\n<h2 id=\"what-problem-am-i-trying-to-solve%3F\">What Problem Am I Trying to Solve?<\/h2>\n\n<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>\n\n<p>I added PHP support first, so if a composer.json file is found, the PHP command is run as the default.<\/p>\n\n<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>\n\n<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>\n\n<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>\n\n<p>The screenshot in the tweet showed this, along with the text \"Minimum viable feature flag.\"<\/p>\n\n<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>\n\n<p>If it would be a long time before I looked at it again, I'd take a different approach.<\/p>\n\n<h2 id=\"here%27s-the-thing\">Here's the Thing<\/h2>\n\n<p>One of the main rules of using feature flags is that they should be short-lived.<\/p>\n\n<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>\n\n<p>A feature flag is a temporary solution for separating the deployment of code from the release of a change.<\/p>\n\n<p>Once it's been released, the flag should be removed.<\/p>\n\n        ",
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