Tools
9 min read
Feature flags are a database
Once a flag has an owner, a rollout and a history, it is data. Treat it like data and most of the mess goes away.
A feature flag starts as an if statement. Six months later it has an owner nobody remembers, three environments and a rollout someone set to 25% and forgot.
What data looks like
A flag needs a name, a value per environment, an owner and a date it should be deleted. Give it those and you can query it: which flags are older than ninety days, which have never been turned on.
Delete on purpose
Tern refuses to create a flag without an expiry date. It sounds strict. In practice it turned a graveyard of 60 flags into a list of nine.
Written by
Iri Halvorsen, software engineer in Bergen
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