Feature flags activate features for some users whilst hiding them for others. They help you deploy code more often, work more collaboratively, get early feedback from colleagues and customers and separate deployment from feature activation - no more panicking because the ci is broken and there is an urgent need to deploy or hide a feature !

We have adopted feature flags this year as part of a move towards trunk-based development. They have helped our team to merge code continuously into a shared branch, deploying updates for customers multiple times per week and testing new features with selected customers before deploying them for all customers. We started with a simple front-end implementation in React before adopting Django-waffle in our backend for a more complete solution.

This talk will explain:

• What are feature flags ?
• How we use them in trunk based development to accelerate feature development, working more closely as a team
• Implementing simple Feature Flags in Python and Django
• Django-waffle: a fully-featured feature-flag library for Django which integrates well with the standard Django user model and groups. I have been contributing to maintaining and the library and updating its documentation this year.