David Herbert

Tests! They've been haunting us since our school days when even the mere mention of the word would send shivers down our spines and make us dream of a world without pop quizzes.

Well, guess what? The world of software development didn't get the memo! In fact, they've gone and upped the ante with a little something called "testing in production." Oh, the nightmare! It's like a horror movie where the monster lurking around the corner is a bug that slipped through QA!

The role of a "developer advocate" has gained significant traction in recent years, thanks to leading tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Google. This role is particularly prevalent in technology companies that cater to developers. But what exactly does it entail? Who can become a developer advocate, and what qualities are essential to succeed in this role?

Choosing the right SaaS (Software as a Service) provider is a crucial decision for any organization. When evaluating potential vendors, it's essential to have a clear understanding of their security measures, service level agreements, and other factors that may impact your business.

Here are some key questions to help guide your evaluation process.

In today's fast-paced world, the web development landscape is constantly evolving, with user expectations for fast and responsive applications driving innovation. The need for more modular, scalable, and maintainable architectures is more crucial than ever, as web applications are now required to be highly adaptable and feature-rich.

This has led to the rise of Microfrontends, an architectural approach that addresses the challenges faced by large frontend development teams working on monolithic frontend applications. Microfrontends have emerged as a solution to this challenge by breaking down these frontend monoliths into smaller, manageable components owned by cross-functional teams to facilitate the independent delivery of updates and new features.

While there may not be a one-size-fits-all solution for optimizing workflow and maximizing productivity, you can often put things in place to really up your productivity game. At ConfigCat, we understand this and strive to provide our customers with the essential integration tools to help automate their feature flagging workflow.

For this reason, we are thrilled to announce that ConfigCat now has an official integration with Zapier, a powerful automation tool. With this Zapier integration, you can now connect ConfigCat with over 5,000+ apps, unlocking a new level of automation for your feature flagging workflow. This allows you to make things happen on autopilot without ever having to touch them after the initial integration. And you know what's most interesting about this integration? No code is required! It's like having superpowers.

Clients with global customer bases often hesitate to use feature flags for specific use cases due to concerns regarding possible latency and slow response time. Feature flags let you launch new features and change your software configuration without (re)deploying code.

That's why fast response time is of great importance at ConfigCat. For context, ConfigCat is a developer-centric feature flag service with unlimited team size, awesome support, and a reasonable price tag.

To that end, ConfigCat provides data centers at numerous global locations to ensure high availability and fast response time all around the globe. These data centers are all equipped with multiple CDN nodes to guarantee proper redundancy and multiple layers of load balancing based on geolocation to achieve speed, throughput, reliability, and compliance. Thanks to a previous DDoS incident, ConfigCat also got the chance to test its infrastructure in real life and made preemptive security improvements.

As customer expectations keep evolving, we are also looking for new solutions to meet these expectations.

We want to introduce an alternative way to access the features and functionality of our platform via our Public Management API.

The Public Management API makes it easier to test and control your feature flags by providing more flexibility in how you create, read, update and delete any entity within ConfigCat, such as feature flags, configs, environments, or products.

This API enables users to have a programmatic interface to access the same functionality on the ConfigCat Dashboard UI, which can be especially useful for tests, tools, or scripts. The benefits should already be obvious to anyone familiar with public API systems. However, if you are not, we'll explore how you can make feature requests quickly and easily using this feature, all without writing any external code.

When deploying code, one of the best ways to ensure it's high quality, meets user or business requirements, and works as it should is by feature flagging it. Feature flags are a great way to control the release of new code or features in your software, as feature flags make it possible to test new code on specific users or a group of users before releasing them to everyone.

Feature flagging allows you and your team to easily experiment with new features or make changes to existing ones without deploying a new software version. Furthermore, feature flags make it possible for you and your team to seamlessly execute trunk-based development by facilitating continuous deployments and ensuring code integration reliability.

This guide will cover how we can use feature flags to introduce new features in a Svelte application.

Feature flags are a great way to control the release of new features in your software. They allow you to easily turn new features on or off without redeploying your code.

However, when implementing a feature flag in an application, we may want to customize its management after the initial release, i.e., schedule an incremental release/delivery strategy that is carried out automatically or schedule future changes to a flag's targeting rule that can take effect at specific time intervals.

For example:

• Activate a flag’s config by date and time. For instance, release a feature at noon on a Sunday afternoon.
• Gradually increase the discount value of an ongoing promotion at specific times of weekdays.
• Enable a feature only on weekends or on weekdays.
• Three days from today, turn on a feature for internal testing and enable it for public use a week later.

Softwares and libraries often evolve to include new features, security patches, bug fixes, and refactorings. When software evolves, it may introduce breaking changes (BCs) in its API, breaking the previous contract or compatibility with its clients.

Semantic Versioning (SemVer) is a specification for assigning version numbers to software to communicate the degree of change between software releases and updates. However, it turned out the world was missing a proper semantic version library for C++, so we implemented one.