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A contemplation of how feature management tools might evolve to better support how feature flags are used in practice

Inputs This month, I read Ted Chiang’s two books of short stories, Exhalation and Stories of Your Life and Others, both of which were incredible. Chiang’s stories are often presented in the first person, and he allows the circumstances of the story and protagonist to affect the writing style of a story; two of my favorite stories, Story of Your Life (which was the basis for the movie Arrival) and Understand, are both good examples of this.

Inputs Meghan, Jasper, and I camped at Jekyll Island for a few days to celebrate our wedding anniversary. It was Jasper’s first time seeing the ocean, and our first vacation in quite a while without other family or friends joining. It’s a friendly, quiet place to get away – we loved it. I finally finished the second book in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series, which I had been pecking at all year.

Several of my past companies have had an onboarding convention where a new developer makes a code change that is deployed to production on their first day, or at least their first day after any company-wide onboarding is finished. This is hard to pull off, but in some ways that can be a benefit, and there are a lot of good reasons to do it. Here are a few:

Inputs The only book I read this month was Andy Weir’s latest, Project Hail Mary, which delivered more or less as promised - a scientifically dense but nonetheless easy-to-read page-turner that is surely destined for the silver screen. I spent a lot of time with newer rap releases this month, including Dave’s “We’re All in this Alone Together”, Mach-Hommy’s “Pray for Haiti”, and Vince Staples’ self-titled album. I also fell down a deep Phoebe Bridgers rabbit hole, but that barely warrants mentioning given it happens practically every month now.