Like many engineering teams, SPS Commerce has been on a journey to Agile and DevOps over the past decade. Consistently, one of the strongest enablers to a more frictionless DevOps culture and experience has been the decoupling of the deploy from the release of a feature. Essentially, if I can deploy as often as I want independent of when I make a feature available to the users via Feature Flags I can begin to achieve elite DevOps practices and velocity.
DEPLOY != RELEASE
Feature flagging concepts have enabled a great deal of velocity to teams at SPS Commerce, which is why I am excited to be able to continually share and discuss this practice amongst the community. As a result, on May 14, I had a great opportunity to join the “Toronto Enterprise DevOps User Group” and talk about Feature Flags. We had a great time and some strong questions for discussion.
**UPDATE: The session was recorded and you can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5PyxjEywH8
This content was originally prepped for a session at GlueCon 2020 that was scheduled for May 2020. For obvious world events that was rescheduled for October 2020. Nevertheless, glad to be able to get a jump start and share some of the content and ideas locally throughout some of the Toronto user groups and meetups. If you’d like to catch the session virtually, there are two others scheduled right now:
North Toronto Cloud & DevOps User Group
Sure is an interesting time while a lot of the world is quarantining. This has forced a lot of organizations to evolve and adapt or die. The world of meetups and conferences is no different. As an advantage, the amount of available free virtual conferences has exploded making a lot of great content available to all. As a result, the conference landscape may never be the same again.
Meetups have also switched to virtual or online events at this point. I’m happy that this makes it more accessible to some, and enables a higher level of convenience for those of us that live further away, or have family commitments, etc. But I must say, that a large amount of the Conference and Meetup benefit is missing… the networking! I believe we are a relational people, and connecting virtually is just not the same as being there in person. Especially as a virtual speaker, its is really tough to take queues from the audience and feed off their energy (and in some cases make some course changes for your talk as you see how the audience reacts). Speaking and attending virtual events requires a different skill set that I think we are all learning on the fly. What are your best tips you have learned so far?