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I think this depends on the stage, but I don't think for us deploying weekly instead of 4x per week (M-Th). Would help.

We also found feature flags slowed us down a lot in the early stages. I feel these should only be done for some features (e.g. an explicit AB test, a large feature with a lot of technical risk). Feature flags create a ton of complexity, and are often not worth it.

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Deploying 4x is better, but not every team can do it without sacrificing quality.

That essay was written based on 3 three pre Series A companies, which didn't have right processes in place and was struggling to ship fast enough. Weekly deploys is a first step. It's difficult to impossible to deploy more often if you don't have good tests coverage.

Agreed on both counts. At my last startup, there was a release every few hours. We used feature flags for anything where the code's future was uncertain, especially experiments. But once the experiment was resolved, we mercilessly removed the flag, refactored the code to reflect what we'd learned, and added tests.

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