Engineer Explains: What are feature flags in 3 minutes

We've asked experienced engineers to share how they would explain some tech terminology at three levels of experience - from junior developer to CTO.

Feature flags—who wouldn’t love them? They make software releases easier and less stressful for developers.

Feature flags (or feature toggles) are a software development tool that allow developers to enable or disable a feature without modifying the source code or performing a new deployment.

And, in case something goes wrong, they don’t have to roll back the whole release and push out a new deploy.

In this video, Brian Rinaldi, Developer Experience Engineer at LaunchDarkly, explains feature flags to junior and senior developers, as well as CTOs.

This video is a part of ShiftMag’s video series, Engineer Explains.

We’ve asked experienced engineers to share how they would explain some basic and some less basic tech terminology to different tech job titles or at three levels of experience — from junior developer to CTO.

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How would you explain APIs, internal developer platforms, software architecture, software testing, scaling infrastructure without breaking the bank, low-code as a dev tool, what is a database, Network APIs, Developer Relations, Large Language Models, JAMstack or obervability at three levels of experience?