Recently, LaunchDarkly’s Manager of Developer Marketing, Dawn Parzych, hosted a “Launch + Learn” discussion with a couple of our customers to talk about what it takes to better manage releases, technical debt, and the feature flag lifecycle.
She was joined by Maya Li, staff software engineer at Calm and team lead for the product infrastructure engineering team, and Harshyt Goel, one of the earliest software engineers at Loom who is now engineering manager for the platform.
Internally, we are big fans of both Calm and Loom. Taking care of your mental health these days is incredibly important, and Calm is a great app to assist. Meanwhile, Loom is a powerful video messaging tool that helps you share quick pieces of information without needing to schedule a meeting.
The Q&A with Maya and Harshyt spanned everything from previous nightmare release experiences to productivity hacks—and a few podcast and book recommendations as well. Below is a brief recap and some excerpts of what was covered during the 40-minute discussion.
How do your teams at Calm and Loom utilize LaunchDarkly?
Naturally, we were curious how Maya and Harshyt’s respective teams use LaunchDarkly for their development and releases.
“We use it for pretty much everything—probably things it shouldn't be used for, to be honest,” Harshyt said. He also explained how Loom implemented their whole A/B testing stack based on LaunchDarkly, including how it buckets users. ”We are heavily dependent on LaunchDarkly at this point,” he added.
As for Maya, she explained that her teams use LaunchDarkly mostly for feature flagging at the present moment, but they are also currently exploring its use as an experimentation platform.
Prior to using LaunchDarkly, the team at Calm managed future releases by client versions. “So for example, we may be releasing an IOS app with a version that is internal to Calm,” she said. “We would gate the API side of the features based on that client version.”
Maya recalled that she first learned of LaunchDarkly after being introduced to our co-founder and CTO, John Kodumal, at a meetup in San Francisco, which was not too long before she joined Calm.
“The first hackathon I did at Calm was actually helping to introduce LaunchDarkly to the team,” she said. “It only took an hour or two!”
Worst thing you've ever released into production, and what was the impact?
Everyone loves a good dev horror story!
Harshyt recounted a tale from his time at Facebook, when he nearly “broke” Messenger. Fortunately, he and his team were able to catch the mistake before it went out to “the whole world.” He also had an interesting tale about an issue with Loom’s Chrome extension that quickly went south.
Maya’s story was really about sleep deprivation tied to an incredibly inefficient way to roll out two-factor authentication at her former place of work.
“We were having a hard time verifying that it worked. I remember flying to the headquarters in San Francisco from Seattle for the release,” she said. “And we were there until 4 a.m. We went back to the hotel, slept until 7 a.m., and went straight back to the office.”
Prior to adopting LaunchDarkly, Maya said she eventually came to realize that her team could’ve done the rollout during the daytime if they had been able to introduce small changes one at a time, with the ability to slowly turn each one on and predictably test them in production. “That would've been beautiful,” she said.
Watch the webinar to hear it all
This is just a small sampling of what we covered during the webinar, which includes answers from Maya and Harshyt about to questions like:
- How do your teams measure the impact or success of a release, and what impact has LaunchDarkly and feature flags had on that?
- What's something you wish you knew before deploying your first feature flag and implementing LaunchDarkly? What would you tell your older self before starting off on this journey?
- Can you share any other productivity hacks—be it code or life-related—to help people on a productivity front?
- Are you using external tools? How are you managing flags as they accumulate in your systems?
And, just to throw a bit of non-dev content in the mix, Miya and Harshyt share some books and podcasts they’ve been enjoying as of late.
