[MUSIC]
>> We're going to shift our spotlight now
over to one of our partners, LaunchDarkly,
who just brought us
a fantastic breakout session a bit ago on how to reduce
your technical debt using
LaunchDarkly's feature flags which
are in Visual Studio Code,
GitHub, and Microsoft Teams.
If you enjoyed that session as much as I did and want to
hear more from the presenter, you're in luck.
Please join me in welcoming
our principal dev advocate at LaunchDarkly,
Heidi Waterhouse. Hello, Heidi.
>> Hey, Dona, how are you doing?
>> I'm awesome. By the way,
your background is sweet.
What is going on with those lights?
That looks really cool.
>> Those are the Nanoleaf hex lights,
and I love them.
>> We're going to have
a very long conversation about these lights later,
but right now, I would
love for you to introduce yourself to the audience,
and tell them who you are and what you do.
>> Hi, I'm Heidi Waterhouse.
I am a principal developer advocate,
but I call myself a transformation
advocate because my job at
LaunchDarkly is to help
people overcome that chasmed fear of
moving to CI/CD by giving them
some better tools for
how to manage it with feature management.
>> I love that. Transformation advocate.
Everyone's doing the digital transformation thing,
and you are the advocate and the guide on how
do you do that exactly, which is really cool.
Love that definition.
We are stealing that, Seth, I'm just telling you, she's come
up with a fantastic name for it.
In the featured session and today at LaunchDarkly,
you've shared a super useful dev tool
called Feature Flags.
Can you tell us a little bit more about what that is?
>> A Feature Flag is
a way to control
code after it's been deployed into production.
It's a way to say, "I want to manage
my features without having to do a whole deploy."
The ability to do that really
changes how you think about what software
is because if you can deploy
broken code without messing anything up for your users,
then you're giving yourself
the opportunity to do a lot of
small-scale canary testing or targeted delivery of value,
so when it comes back to it,
when it comes down to the code,
it's a fancy if statement.
A lot of people say, "Well,
I can write a fancy if statement, why should I bother?"
But the architecture that it takes
to drive a fancy if statement with
a sub half-second response time all
around the world is non-trivial,
so we're trying to give people the opportunity to use
this tool in a safe and scalable way.
>> I love that term.
Feature Flag = fancy if statement,
except way easier to use.
I've used Feature Flags as
a dev productivity tool forever and ever,
but you actually mentioned that
it's actually something that
might also be like a
business user productivity tool
or a sales productivity tool.
Can you tell us about that?
That was fascinating to me.
>> One of the things that I've been
thinking about is how does
this extend from developer to business user?
I was thinking about, say,
you're in a support environment
and something is going wrong with the new rollout.
Well, it used to be you either
had to contact the developer and get them to
redeploy or you had to manage it somehow,
but now, as a support person,
you have this no-code way to say,
"Something's wrong with that feature.
We're turning it off right now,"
or you have a way to do entitlements that doesn't
require you to do a lot
of sophisticated table joins because you can just say,
"All of the people in
this segment get this version of the product,
and all of the people who are paying
extra get the super fancy version."
>> I love that because what you're saying
is the way we would use an if statement in code,
you can actually use it just in the data store.
You can say, "Only deploy to
these people," like your canary ring or,
"Show these people this ad", or,
"Show that people this offering",
or whatever sales things.
I have never thought about using Feature Flags like that,
and you've completely changed my mind.
I'm like, "What is she talking about?
Why is she saying Feature Flag is a sales tool?
That's so random," but this makes sense.
It makes a lot of sense because we have these events,
and we're saying, "If you're located in X many countries,
we want to send you information about this time zone,
and if you're located in North America,
we're going to send you about this time zone",
so that makes perfect sense.
I have never thought about that way, Heidi.
Other use cases, tell us.
>> Then if you stack the segment up, so you're saying,
"I want people in this time zone", but
this time zone includes people who
speak English and people who speak Spanish.
What if I knew both of those things
and could deliver even more precisely and
say, this is the thing
that you particularly will be the delighted by.
>> It's such a good marketing tool.
Not to do marketing,
but to organize your marketing thinking
or organize your communications thinking really,
which is such a cool idea.
What are some of
the other use cases that
LaunchDarkly is really focused on?
I loved this one. This is the cool one.
>> I love the kill switch use case,
and the automated kill switch is the best.
You have an API pipeline that's inbound,
and it's feeding you data, blah,
blah, blah, it's all good.
All of a sudden, your monitoring notices that you
have 100 X spike in inbound traffic.
Well, either you really did something
right and your marketing
people all deserve some fancy drinks,
or you have a DDoS attack going on.
Either way, you want to shunt
that information off into a separate database,
so it doesn't contaminate your usual database,
but at the speed this is happening,
you don't really have human time to react,
so you link your monitoring tool up
to LaunchDarkly and say, "Look,
if you exceed this threshold, switch over,
cut over the flow to the overflow database
and wake somebody up to deal with
it", but you still get that grace period.
>> That is a very creative way to think about it.
I hope everyone's taking
notes because I'm learning so much,
and if you haven't watched the Featured Partner session,
you should watch it.
It's one of the best I've seen.
I thought it was just fantastic.
How can people learn more about LaunchDarkly,
your use cases, your customers, etc., etc.
>> Well, we're really excited
to be a sponsor here at Build,
and we've put together a page of
resources so that you can go visit all of those.
We have books, we have talks,
we have recordings, we have demos,
we have demo request.
We want you to come talk to us and
figure out how your business needs and
your developer needs can be met by the ability
to manage your features and progressively deliver value.
>> You have no idea how much I wish for
a real Build because then you and I would be
getting fancy drinks after this and talking
about this because, suddenly,
I have a hundred different ideas on,
"I wonder if I can use it for Power Apps to say,
'I don't want these to turn live yet,
the screen or that thing.
I'm just building it, but I don't want it live.'"
Now, I'm like, "Ugh, I so want to do it."
With Visual Studio code though, I can do it.
>> Yeah.
>> I love It. Heidi, thank you so much for being in here.
What a fabulous conversation this was.
Have an amazing Build.
>> Thank you so much, Dona.
>> Everyone, if you missed it,
definitely check out Heidi's breakout session on-demand
which features LaunchDarkly customer iPipeline UK,
and if you'd like to dive deeper into GitHub,
Microsoft Teams, and Visual Studio Code integration,
check out the upcoming Ask the Experts live session
with one of Heidi's LaunchDarkly colleagues
over in the Connection Zone.
To close, Heidi and I want
to give a humongous shout-out to
all of our fellow neurodivergent
friends who are watching us.
We see you, we are you,
you're not alone. Thank you.