51 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
51 lines
2.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Feature flags should be short-lived
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date: 2024-03-11
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permalink: daily/2024/03/11/feature-flags-should-be-short-lived
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tags:
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- software-development
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- feature-flags
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cta: subscription
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snippet: |
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Feature flags should be short-lived. Once the change has been released, the flags should be removed.
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---
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Today, I [posted a tweet][tweet] with a screenshot of some code.
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When previously working on the [Versa CLI tool][versa], I had a TODO comment saying "What if there are multiple languages?".
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Versa is a tool for standardising commands between different languages and frameworks, but some projects, like my personal website, use multiple languages.
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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).
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## What Problem Am I Trying to Solve?
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Depending on the language, commands like `versa install` will need to execute a different command - e.g., composer install` or `npm install` (or an equivalent node package manager).
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I added PHP support first, so if a composer.json file is found, the PHP command is run as the default.
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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.
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This led me to do a spike of using Symfony Console's `choice` method to see what that would look like so I could add a screenshot to the GitHub issue.
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Once I'd finished with the spike, rather than deleting the code, I wrapped it in an `if (false)` condition so it wouldn't be executed, but I could still re-enable it in the future.
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The screenshot in the tweet showed this, along with the text "Minimum viable feature flag."
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This is only supposed to be there for a short time until I revisit the code and implement the feature I was spiking on.
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If it would be a long time before I looked at it again, I'd take a different approach.
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## Here's the Thing
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One of the main rules of using feature flags is that they should be short-lived.
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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.
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A feature flag is a temporary solution for separating the deployment of code from the release of a change.
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Once it's been released, the flag should be removed.
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[tweet]: https://twitter.com/opdavies/status/1767846980250714261
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[versa]: {{site.url}}/daily/2024/02/19/introducing-versa
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