Top all-time · #2306
LaunchDarkly
Company blog · blog.launchdarkly.comprogrammingbusiness
LaunchDarkly is the company blog at blog.launchdarkly.com, writing about programming and business. Since 2015, 31 different Hacker News readers have linked it 69 times, most often “Feature flagging to mitigate risk in database migration”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link LaunchDarkly's blog for posts on feature flags, such as removing flag conditionals with a cleanup branch and managing flag lifecycles to avoid technical debt.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Get tips and best practices on feature management, developing great AI apps, running smart experiments, and more.
Most-linked posts?
- Feature flagging to mitigate risk in database migration3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-05-03
- How to use feature flags without technical debt3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-05-17
- A New Way to Conduct Real-Time User Research2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-06
- Feature Flags for Product Managers – The New Agile2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-01-05
- Feature Flag-Driven Development2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-11-03
- Tonight We Monitor, for Tomorrow, We Test in Production2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-03-16
What Hacker News says?
I'm a Developer Advocate at LaunchDarkly, and we've written a bunch of different guides over the years. For a good intro that discusses first steps with flags and also how to approach testing flagged code, see our eBook "Effective Feature Management"[1] (Download page is right behind the form, you don't need to wait for an email or anything) One of the best ways to start is add a simple kill-switch to low-impact cod…
Comment linking /
on “Piranha: An Open Source Tool to Automatically Delete Stale Code”Submitted Adopting Feature Flag-Driven Releases as a story · 71 points
HN discussionI usually skip feature flags for things like bug fixes where the risk that my 'fix' is actually worse than the initial bug is very small, or changes where it cannot make sense to have both modes operating at once. An example of this might be a new billing scheme, where the old system billed by the item, and the new system billed by the pound. There might not be a technical reason why both cannot co-exist, but it wou…
Comment linking /feature-flagging-to-mitigate-risk-in-database-migration/
on “Adopting Feature Flag-Driven Releases”Submitted Visibility and Monitoring for Machine Learning Models as a story · 64 points
HN discussionCheckout this article the author wrote in may, http://blog.launchdarkly.com/how-to-use-feature-flags-withou... The idea is you create a branch to delete those conditionals before the feature flag is activated. Once it's activated, you merge in that branch.
Comment linking /how-to-use-feature-flags-without-technical-debt/
on “Adopting Feature Flag-Driven Releases”Submitted How to use feature flags without technical debt as a story · 60 points
HN discussionIf anyone is interested, I wrote a blog post detailing the cleanup branch approach: http://blog.launchdarkly.com/how-to-use-feature-flags-withou...
Comment linking /how-to-use-feature-flags-without-technical-debt/
on “Adopting Feature Flag-Driven Releases”Submitted LaunchDarkly raises $8.7M for feature flag management as a story · 25 points
HN discussionWe do have some features to help manage the lifecycle of feature flags. For example, we can determine when a flag has been "flipped on" for everyone, and notify you that it's time to remove it. We can also determine that a flag has been removed from your codebase, and prompt you to remove it from LD ( http://blog.launchdarkly.com/launched-flag-status-indicators... ). We have more coming, including an ability to mark…
Comment linking /launched-flag-status-indicators/
on “Show HN: Feature flag management for feature lifecycle control”Submitted Feature flagging to mitigate risk in database migration as a story · 21 points
HN discussionGood question - teams should do what’s best for them based on their resources and scope of feature flagging needs. Though open source libraries exist, they're per language (Ruby, Python). We offer support for all major languages + iOS. As well, we have environment support and access control levels to use feature flags effectively throughout development. You can read more here: http://blog.launchdarkly.com/enterprise…
Comment linking /enterprise-requirements-for-managing-feature-flags/
on “Show HN: Feature flag management for feature lifecycle control”Submitted Implementing feature flags in single page apps, using React and Redux Saga as a story · 19 points
HN discussionYeah, I actually wrote about something similar recently (in the context of a database migration): http://blog.launchdarkly.com/feature-flagging-to-mitigate-ri...
Comment linking /feature-flagging-to-mitigate-risk-in-database-migration/
on “How to use feature flags without technical debt”Submitted Go Serverless Not Flagless as a story · 17 points
HN discussionSubmitted Feature Flag-Driven Development as a story · 15 points
HN discussionSubmitted Eliminating some of the pain of long-lived feature branches as a story · 14 points
HN discussionSubmitted [Podcast] to Be Continuous: When Toasters Broke the Internet as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSubmitted Feature Flag-Driven Products as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSubmitted A New Way to Conduct Real-Time User Research as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSubmitted Running Usability Tests in Production as a story · 12 points
HN discussionSubmitted Testing and Debugging in Production with Distributed Tracing as a story · 11 points
HN discussionSubmitted Transitioning to Feature Flag Management – Guide as a story · 11 points
HN discussionSubmitted New Android SDK for Feature Toggles as a story · 11 points
HN discussionSubmitted LaunchDarkly, #1 Feature Management Platform, Gets $21M in Series B Funding as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Controlling Releases with Microsoft VSTS and LaunchDarkly as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Secrets of Netflix’s Engineering Culture as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted Manage feature flags across disparate code bases as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted DevOps 2.0? as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted How to kill zombie instances and lower your AWS bill as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSubmitted We got your RBAC as a story · 9 points
HN discussion
