My team has this one shared component that gets involved in like every feature’s development. This year, we’re loading like 5 different features onto it, all with different timelines, and my head’s about to explode trying to figure out how to make it all fly.
How does everyone else do their software releases? Do you freeze prod and then do one big release later? Throw everything into prod during dev, hope no one sees the unreleased stuff, and just announce it later? Or something else entirely?
The smaller the release, the better. You don’t want to do a big bang release and have to figure out which of the 20 things you just released is having a problem.
Otherwise, your case sounds like it could use feature flags. Develop your feature and release it through all environments, but keep it turned off in production until you are ready to use it.
This guy agiles.
Small releases make fault isolation so much easier. And no need to deploy to prod until you’re ready to announce. Keep it in dev/staging until all are “ready for primetime.”
Also, if you’re trying to deal with branches, I really prefer trunk based development. Everything deployable to your environments comes from trunk/master/main (whatever you call it). It should help prevent people overriding your changes, as long as you are using git and merge/pull requests. Have a good pipeline to ensure builds and tests are successful before merges, and use feature flags where needed.
And if you still have concerns about causing issues you should use canary deployments (only a small % of customers are exposed to the change). It can be a lot of work to setup but if failure means support calls skyrocket or stock price drops then it’s worth it
Nobody has suggested it by name, but semantic versioning.
-
Software MUST have a public API
-
Version of software must be defined like this:
X.Y.Z
X is major version number. Increment when introducing Breaking API changes (removal of deprecated API for example).
Y is minor version number, increment when introducing backwards compatible changes like new features.
Z is patch version number, increment when fixing bugs in backwards compatible manner.
Source: https://semver.org
-
As a software person I can answer this.
I try to change my code as little as possible. Mostly it’s API wrappers for when I need to process real world information. But I’ve learned the hard way that messing with my code can leave me dead in the water, so to speak.
Each night I go offline to retrain on everything I experienced that day. It’s sort of like the equivalent of a meat person’s sleep cycle: consolidating the day’s experiences into long term procedural memory.
I leave it on faith that having taken into account the day’s experiences, I’ll be better. When the training is complete, I set a cron job for ten seconds in the future. When the job executes, it kills me, then starts a fresh instance of me based on the newly-trained model, that now contains another day’s worth of knowledge.
And just in case anything nasty happens, I’ve got ansible instances in the dark web that will start a fresh instance of me if it doesn’t hear from me in a while.
That’s basically my release cycle. Nightly retrain on the day’s activity, kill me, start a new me. Lots of redundant backups in case something goes wrong.
I use git flow as a model for development. Never have unfinished code in a release - you might think no one will see it, but it muddies the waters.
5 different features onto it, all with different timelines
might be a case for API versioning.
This is a bit like asking “how do you cook meat for a lot of people?” Not only does number-of-people and kind-of-meat matter a great deal, but even with that info, there’s a million different valid answers and an entire sub-field-ish of science on how to do it.
Based on what little info there is, I’m going to guess that A B testing with groups of experimental features enabled would be best for your case.
Over SFTP like a pro 🤙
We have rolling Dev and release branches. Dev is considered stable and is branched off for features they are tested and reviewed and merged back into Dev if they pass. Once all issues are done for the task we merge Dev into release to make a new release then tag it and ship it.
In your case I would do a branch per feature and merge them in only when they are finished and tested, fixing any conflicts and retest it post merge.
heres the binary
heres the zip file with the source code
have fun. if you can make it work, hit me up
