It’s that time of year again. We start to embrace the holiday season and look forward to the new year by recapping our most played artists and songs of the year. How many times did you actually listen to the new Taylor Swift album? Enough to crack the top five?
In the spirit of Spotify Wrapped, we here at LaunchDarkly thought it’d be fun to introduce a Wrapped of our own! In November, we held our Trajectory Conference and, in this article, we’ll recap the top five talks based on our top-secret, proprietary, data-driven, and very scientific ranking model.
If your talk didn’t make the list, don’t worry! You can see the full list of tracks over on our Trajectory page. So without further ado, introducing Trajectory Wrapped 2022:
Product updates galore: contexts, accelerate and more
Jon Schulman walked us through a virtual bevy of updates coming to the LaunchDarkly platform in 2023. In his talk, we learned that sometimes a user isn’t a user. Sometimes it’s a device, or a region, or a store, or just about anything and depending on the context of where/how an application is being accessed it may need specific rules. To solve this, LaunchDarkly is going to be shifting from users to contexts.
What does this change actually mean? Users will have the ability to provide more fine-grained details to LaunchDarkly about who is accessing an application and be able to serve targeting rules based on those details. Here’s an example of a new context for the JavaScript SDK:
const context = {
kind: 'user',
key: 'user-key-123abc',
firstName: 'Sandy',
lastName: 'Smith',
email: 'sandy@example.com',
groups: ['Google', 'Microsoft']
};This context object will get passed to LaunchDarkly and targeting can be done off the various attributes for this specific user. Please see our documentation for full details on how contexts are configured.
That wasn’t all though, Jon also introduced a new capability that we’re calling Accelerate! Accelerate is all about gathering insights, impacts, and data on your organization’s deployments, releases, and flag utilization. For more information about accelerate, contexts, and more feature updates be sure to watch the full talk.
Fireside chatting with Vodafone
Mobile devices and networks represent critical infrastructure in our daily lives. There are a lot of moving parts and one failure could result in catastrophe for their users. Vodafone is no stranger to the challenges of managing performant networks at a massive scale. Our very own, Jessica Cregg sat down with Robert Greville, head of web engineering at Vodafone, to talk about how their feature management setup.
In this talk Robert discusses how Vodafone has increased their release cadence to over 200 times a month! He also discusses some of the challenges they faced along the way. Watch the full video to learn more.
On the road with GM
Cars have become a center for software innovation. We can now control cars with our smartphones, enjoy robust infotainment experiences during our drives, and diagnose mechanical issues just by plugging into the engine. GM is trying to stay on the forefront of these shifts in technology and offer their drivers a best in class software experience. However, as we all know, lots of software means lots of releases, and lots of releases can introduce lots of risk.
To handle that risk, Jim Demercurio, director of mobile solutions in the digital business team at GM, discussed how LaunchDarkly is used at GM. He covers some of the best practices they discovered along the way and the core benefits of having a feature management system in place. Watch Jim’s full talk here.
OneMedical needs feature flags... STAT!
The medical industry is full of pitfalls and regulations when it comes to handling customer information and modernizing applications. The OneMedical team is intimately familiar with these challenges and knew they needed a solution that adapted to the uniqueness of their industry.
Ben Yee, a staff engineer at OneMedical, walked attendees through their journey of implementing a feature management solution with LaunchDarkly. In this talk, Ben discusses some of the core requirements their feature management solution needed to have, including being able to support multiple environments, offering auditability, and being capable of handling PII/PHI data.
Watch this talk to hear what considerations Ben and team made along their journey and how they were able to customize LaunchDarkly to meet the unique needs of their organization. Watch the full talk here.
Let the great experiments begin
Experimentation took center stage at this year’s trajectory. Aaron Montana, experimentation solution specialist at LaunchDarkly, and Gideon Goldman, strategic solution engineer at LaunchDarkly, gave an overview on how to design impactful experiments. Oftentimes, users see the benefits of running experiments to understand the benefits of a proposed change, but the task of actually setting up the experiment might seem a bit daunting. In this talk, Aaron and Gideon give a developer’s perspective on creating and implementing experiments and even give a hands on walkthrough on how to get started. Watch the full talk here to learn more!
Looking for more on experimentation? James Frost, head of product, experimentation at LaunchDarkly, also gave a state of experimentation talk. In it James talked about the advancements that have been made to the platform with regards to our experimentation offering and introduced an upcoming feature for controlling the impacts of a release through experimentation.
Just like your Spotify Wrapped is not a definitive guide to your musical endeavors of 2022 (we all went through that Kate Bush phase this year, right?), this article is not meant to be your definitive guide to all the great things that happened at Trajectory 2022! The full collection of our many great sessions is available on our website. Head on over and watch these greatest hits and discover a few of your own.
