🦥 Feature Flags

Hello friends!

Welcome to this week’s Sloth Bytes. I hope you had a fun week 😄 

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Feature Flags

I’ve been curious about feature flags for a while and wanted to share what I learned 😄

Next week I’ll do a more beginner/fundamental topic! Let me know if you have a topic in mind.

Imagine you have a job (already unrealistic.)

The non-technical CEO wants to launch their brand new “one of a kind never been done before” feature on Friday.

The problem?

This feature has a chance of breaking everything and they want to deploy on a Friday…

That's a dumpster fire waiting to happen.

But there is a way to reduce the potential damage and embarrassment.

Feature flags. 

What Are Feature Flags?

Feature flags are basically if statement with superpowers:

if feature_flag("new_checkout"):
    return new_checkout_experience()
else:
    return old_checkout_experience()

These statements allow you to do things like:

• deploy new features without making them visible to users

• make features visible only to a small amount of users and environments

The Real Power: Gradual Rollouts

Feature flags aren’t ONLY switches (on/off), you can also “roll out” features intelligently.

Slowly increase the amount of users that have access to these features:

def feature_enabled(flag, user_id):
    rollout_percent = get_rollout_percentage(flag)

    # Put users into "buckets."
    user_bucket = hash(f"{flag}:{user_id}") % 100
    #If the user's bucket number is less than the rollout
    #They see the feature
    return user_bucket <= rollout_percent
    #Ex: rollout_percent = 50, users in bucket 0-50 see the feature.

# Monday: 1% → Tuesday: 5% → Wednesday: 25% → Friday: 100% of users

• Same users always see/don't see the feature (consistent experience)

• You can gradually increase the rollout

• If something breaks, only affects small % of users

• No need to maintain lists of who has access

Common Feature Flag Patterns/Use Cases

Kill Switches:

If a feature has a critical bug, traffic spikes or third-party service failures, you can use feature flags to quickly turn off functionality when needed.

This works for ALL features, not just new features.

A/B Testing:

These flags let you test out/experiment features to small amounts of users to see if it’s performing well/worth to maintain.

if feature_variant("button_color") == "green":
    color = "#00ff00"
else:
    color = "#ff0000"

track_conversion(variant=feature_variant("button_color"))

User Targeting:

def should_enable(flag, user):
    # Beta testers
    if user.email in BETA_USERS:
        return True
    
    # Geographic rollout
    if flag == "new_payment" and user.country == "CA":
        return True
    
    # Percentage for others
    return percentage_rollout(flag, user.id)

Wait this sounds complicated?

Yep it is, so it’s not surprising there’s services that handle this annoying stuff.

Some Popular Services

• PostHog

• LaunchDarkly

• Unleash

• GrowthBook

You’re a nerd and wanna learn more?

Check this article out:

Thanks to everyone how submitted!

AspenTheRoyal, BraedenAlonge, dganesh05, emil-case, plantaeart, mau-estradiote, cre-w, spenpal, Fireboy086.

Special shout out to SabhyaAggarwal. I forgot to include his submission last week and it was also his birthday (I felt really bad.)

Feel free to comment Happy late birthday to Sabhya!

How Many Digits between 1 and N

Imagine you took all the numbers between 0 and n and concatenated them together into a long string.

How many digits are there between 0 and n? Write a function that can calculate this.

There are 0 digits between 0 and 1, there are 9 digits between 0 and 10 and there are 189 digits between 0 and 100.

Examples

digits(1)
output = 0

digits(10)
output = 9

digits(100)
output = 189

digits(2020)
output = 6969

How To Submit Answers

Reply with

• A link to your solution (github, twitter, personal blog, portfolio, replit, etc)

• or if you’re on the web version leave a comment!

• If you want to be mentioned here, I’d prefer if you sent a GitHub link or Replit!

That’s all from me!

Have a great week, be safe, make good choices, and have fun coding.

If I made a mistake or you have any questions, feel free to comment below or reply to the email!

See you all next week.

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