Introducing LaunchDarkly Guides

As we continue our learning path in life, often times we need guidance and a way of understanding what the best practice is for things. This guidance can come in many forms within technology, whether that's a tutorial, documentation or a talk. At its core, that's what we aim to do in Developer Relations. Guide you through your path of development. Recently, the Developer Relations team has been working on some exciting things and would love to share it with you. We'd like to introduce you to a new type of content, LaunchDarkly Guides.

As the number of customers on the LaunchDarkly platform has grown, we have looked to learn and improve the experience of our users. We've seen teams across industry verticals—from the world's largest banks to consumer brands building IoT devices—all depend on LaunchDarkly. A common thread is that these teams are all able to increase the speed with which they improve and deliver their software while at the same time reducing or even eliminating the risk from their process.

One of our core values is learning and growth. In the guides, we've distilled lessons learned from our 1000+ customers and best practices for teams that are looking to begin their own practices of feature management as well as scaling across thousands of developers. 

Why use the LaunchDarkly Guides?

Guides are a new form of content for our users (that's you!) that we'll publish on our docs site. Their goal is to educate and provide a deeper level of understanding on our product. Guides bridge the space between how things work (our documentation) and the when and why we built something (our blog). 

As any good documentation site goes, our current set is procedure-based; it tells us how to use LaunchDarkly features, but not why to use them, or who should use them, or what concepts a user needs to know to succeed. Guides help illustrate a journey from getting started to advanced uses of our platform, all the way to writing an integration yourself. 

Guides include best practices for using LaunchDarkly, tutorials for how to complete certain tasks, and so much more. We'll continue writing these in response to common themes and feedback we hear from customers. Our objective is to guide our customers through the platform with as much ease as possible.

Ultimately, we aim to make this a living space, with continued improvements and updates as we move forward in this crazy thing we call the web. We will work towards creating more content for you, and we would love to hear what you think belongs here! 

We can't wait to hear from you with your thoughts on the Guides! Drop us a note as part of our standard product feedback, or offer updates through a pull request on GitHub (just like the rest of our documentation).

Guides are here to expose knowledge and walk you through successful paths of LaunchDarkly. We hope that we can help continue guiding you on your journey, wherever that may be.