At Kantan, we're changing the lives of tradespeople by giving them the tools to excel in a competitive marketplace. Our product is a React Native app that helps them serve customers, manage operations and grow their business. We have thousands of tradespeople managing hundreds of thousands of jobs on our platform. And we are just getting started.

To enable us to grow and scale on the journey to become the number one application for tradespeople in the UK, we need to move quickly, pushing our product and features to market faster than our competitors whilst maintaining quality and ensuring we have complete control over our production environment.

Features can sometimes reach a high-enough level of complexity that simply cramming the entire thing behind a single feature flag and calling it a day becomes widely impractical.

More modular feature control needs to be thought of and implemented beforehand. Since such scenarios happen quite often all throughout development, a more advanced form of feature flag management is needed.

Understanding the Flag Hierarchy​

While the base concept of feature flagging remains untouched (in the sense that they still toggle stuff on and off), feature flags nowadays tend to act more like an interconnected web of toggles where they may or may not be dependent on each other to run. The main benefit of all this added complexity is the ability to use flags to control certain parts of a feature in a very modular and clean way.

Growing up as a child of the ’90s has always been a bitter-sweet kind of experience, but it certainly also came with a multitude of benefits. We’ve been exposed to countless priceless moments that have come and passed, moments that stand to make history and which may never be experienced again by newer generations. One such example of a beautiful lived-through historical moment is growing up with the fabled Space Invaders game.

Simple yet memorable, Space Invaders made waves across the world and undoubtedly served as a catalyst for the revival of a previously stale and dying gaming industry that’s now priced at no less than 173.7 billion USD.

In this post, we’ll look at how we can easily implement a canary release of a feature in 7 steps using ConfigCat’s feature flagging service through its provided dashboard.

This step-by-step guide will showcase how we can release a new feature incrementally, by first exposing it to low-risk user groups (e.g. team members and possibly friends), and then gradually releasing it to a larger audience - using ConfigCat, a feature flag service to implement everything.

Let's take a look at how practical a feature flag can be in a Phaser.io application. Phaser is one of the most popular browser game libraries and with its help, I'll build a simple game that replicates the experience of being in a music studio. Let's get started!

Feature flags have greatly simplified the process of continuously testing and integrating new features into our applications. They ensure confidence even in production environments, eliminating deployment risks such as downtimes or bugs that could adversely affect the entire user base.

Let's play with a hypothetical scenario where you've built a Kotlin-based mobile application, and you'd like to customize the overall user experience based on specified criteria. You've got a perfect idea, but then this question pops up everywhere: Now what? Folks, allow me to introduce you to the concept of feature flags in Kotlin.

Building a modern application often involves building it as a microservice, which provides developers with more flexibility and agility in terms of deployment options. However, deployment can either be a joy or a nightmare, depending on the strategy used, whether it's deploying microservices, testing new features, updating a business logic, or releasing a new version entirely? With every code change pushed, comes the risk of potential failures, which could be as a result of bad code quality or unexpected bugs, and this can potentially disrupt the user's experience.

Hence, picking an efficient deployment strategy is key to mitigating these deployment risks and not having to constantly disrupt your user’s experience by going into downtimes or completely having to go offline whenever there is something to be deployed.

ConfigCat Awarded High Performer By G2​

We at ConfigCat are thrilled and proud to announce that ConfigCat was awarded the prestigious “High Performer” award by G2 in their winter 2022 report for Configuration Management Software. These awards are given based on customers' feedback on products or services that they use, which makes them especially prestigious.

In the context of SaaS applications, having a tool that allows you to control different features and flag certain users is critical, given the uniqueness of their needs and the instability of new releases.

This is where the ConfigCat Elixir SDK's tale begins. This is the simplified narrative of a great open-source SDK, driven by highly-professional folks from three different companies, as told by one of its creators.