Toggle Talk with Slack's Director of Engineering Josh Wills

In an interview with Josh Wills, Director of Engineering at Slack, he emphasized the importance of feature flagging in continuous deployment and learning. He started implementing feature flags at Google in 2007 and believes that not launching products frequently is scarier than deploying them continuously. Feature flagging allows for rapid iteration and experimentation, which is crucial for data science and machine learning applications. Wills prefers to call it the "experiment framework" and finds it most useful for data-driven decision making in applications. He also mentioned that while there are some cases where feature flags may not be ideal, such as switching backend systems, their benefits generally outweigh the costs. Wills believes that feature flags play a crucial role in DevOps and continuous delivery, and he hopes to see them evolve towards striking a balance between on/off switches and Turing-complete programming languages.