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Comment by tdumitrescu | Hacker News Reader

Seriously. This is one of those cases where rolling your own really does make sense. Flags in a DB table, flags in a json file, all super simple to build and maintain, and 100x faster and more reliable than making the critical paths of your application's request cycle depend on an external provider.

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You know what I would find worse than telling my customers that they can't access the application they paid for and works because I farmed my auth out to a 3rd party that is having an outage?

Telling them that my auth provider isn't out, but the thing I use to show them a blue button vs a red button is.

Oof.

Has this actually been a problem? We’ve been using launch darkly for years and if they do have an outage (which is really really rare) the flag will be set to the default value. It’s also very very cheap, maybe $500 a month.

$500 a month and it has had many major outages in 2024 alone. lol

https://status.launchdarkly.com/uptime?page=5

What about ConfigCat?

I don't know, why don't you do the research and let us know?

We did this. Two tables. One for feature flags, with name, desc, id, enum (none, defaultToEnabled, overrideToDisabled). One for user flag overrides, with flagId, userId, enum (enabled, disabled).

The combination of these two has been all we've ever needed. User segmentation, A/B testing, pilot soft launch etc are all easy.

Would you mind expanding on the usage of enums for the feature flags table? Why not use a boolean?

We actually did use booleans, I just found it easier to explain using enums, and the code would have been simpler if we'd done it that way.

In years of trying to sell things I've found that one of the best selling points to management is "susceptible to vendor lock-in", "you don't own your customer database", etc.

I have no idea why that is.

I'm confused. Are you saying this ironically or have you literally pitched management with the risks of using your product?

I developed an open source "user management system" circa 2001 which I used on several sites, including one that had 400,000+ users, a famous preprint archive and the web site of a county-level green party. It was patterned on what sites like Yahoo and Amazon had at the time, did email verification and numerous things that were a hassle to implement, had great screens for the administrators, all of that.

I couldn't get anybody else to adopt this software despite putting a lot of work into making it easy to pick up and install.

10 years later competitors popped up like mushrooms and were adopted quickly. The thing they all had in common was somebody else owned your user database. So yeah I feel pretty cynical.

There's such a thing as being too early.

My university had a great shared browser bookmark management system, even with a basic discussion support for them. In 1998. It was not super popular because people just didn't have that many links to share, eventually it fell offline and got accidentally deleted in 2001.

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