Flagsmith

Finish this sentence: Feature flags and observability go together like... We're 1 week out from our webinar with Grafana Labs 🔥 We'll cover how to track your feature health in-platform using Grafana as well as share best practices for using observability tools with Flagsmith. 🗓️ Wednesday, October 22nd: 3pm BST, 4pm CST, 10am EST Save your seat: https://lnkd.in/dQHu67jq

Being our own target customer meant we were able to dog food our own product as we built Flagsmith. There's a massive loss of information when you have to interview your target customer, and it's just different to having lived as the target customer for seven years. It's incomparable, really. For us it showed up in the way we developed the core product. We built what we knew we needed, and what was solid for us as the target customer (startup to larger "scale-up" size). We put a lot of thought into making the product genuinely useful for engineers and making sure it was set up for the ways people would use it day-to-day. We didn't have experience being the user in a larger organisation, though. So features that larger organisations needed (role-based access etc.) weren't in our original roadmap. We built those in as we found PMF and built out our target customer and strategy. Everyone builds a bit differently, but this way really worked for us. And the core product is basically still the same today.

Join us on October 22nd for an in-depth webinar on observability & feature flagging with Grafana Labs! We'll cover how to track your feature health in-platform using Grafana as well as share best practices for using observability tools with Flagsmith. Wednesday, October 22nd: 3pm BST, 4pm CST, 10am EST 🤙 Learn more: https://lnkd.in/dQHu67jq

Tired of writing endless Redux boilerplate? 😩 Check out how Redux Toolkit makes state management cleaner, faster, and easier. Kapeel Kokane, Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft covers: - The official way to use Redux - Built-in utilities that simplify everything - A better dev experience, guaranteed Watch now: https://lnkd.in/gGjaNUYZ

Contributing to open source projects is great for your brand and CV. And it can be a solid way to get your foot in the door with COSS companies you want to work for. (We've hired open source contributors before!) When you're in, it's well worth it. Working for an open source company means you work directly with users, iterate with them and get quick feedback cycles for issues. Sometimes that happens with closed source SaaS projects, but it's inherent with open source work. Had a chat with Jason Bosco about how he thinks about open source hiring at TypeSense as part of a series of chats about building COSS companies.

Would you pay for a billboard in Times Square? Typesense has quietly gone from open-source side project to ~10B searches/month, 19M Docker pulls, and 23K GitHub stars, and they've not been afraid to market “Open Source Search” loudly. 🔥 Alongside a dash of IRL SEO they've leant (hard) into their open-source community. Jason Bosco and Ben Rometsch get into: - Community as an engine: how open code lowers adoption friction and hardens the product - Saying “no” to the wrong features to keep your core sharp - LLMs + search that actually work: conversational search and natural-language → structured queries If you’re building a commercial open-source product, watch now! Watch episode 2 of The ‘C’ in COSS Podcast: https://lnkd.in/dq-8nubd #Flagsmith #Typesense #OpenSource #SaaS #DevTools #IndieHacker #EngineeringLeadership #StartupJourney #FeatureFlags #DeveloperTools #TechnicalFounders

Most of starting Flagsmith didn't feel cinematic. It was mostly spreadsheets, pull requests, and a stubborn unwillingness to accept painful releases as a fact of life. We've built it into a profitable, sustainable COSS business, and it feels like a good time to keep sharing some lessons from our journey. Hopefully this is helpful if you're also building a COSS business and don't want to lose your sense of humour (or your weekends). Here are a couple to start: 1. Feature flagging wasn't a visionary idea; it was a necessity Existing solutions didn't exist for what we needed on GitHub, so we built what we needed and used it immediately. Dogfooding wasn't a strategy, it was triage. 2. Score ideas as if time were your only money (it is.) We had a lightweight proposal process. Anyone could pitch, but you had to answer pragmatic questions like: who's the first user, why are we good at this, is this a known problem or one we hope exists? The right answers for Flagsmith were delightfully boring: We are the customer. And it's a problem we're feeling now. That cut months of speculation and helped us write an MVP that's suspiciously like the core product today. If you're solving a problem you hope exists, you're in for some headaches.