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Happy Saturday!

Hope everyone is doing well and staying safe. Welcome to the eighteenth edition of this newsletter. Here’s some of the best of what I read and wrote about this week.

From the blog

This week I about what Feature Toggles are and how you can use them for faster and safer code deployments. This should be read in conjunction with my article on removing bottlenecks (technical and mental) to faster software delivery. Feature Toggles are an extremely powerful and accessible tool for developers for decoupling software deployment from feature release. They, alongside other forms of runtime configuration, can also play an important role in mitigating incidents in production. Let me know if you have memorable use cases of feature toggles saving your systems in production - I love hearing war stories! Article Link

From the great interweb

1. Remember the Google outage which saved us all a few hours of Meets meetings and caused tons of other grief around the world? Google has published an RCA for the incident, and while many like Cindy continue to get triggered by the use of the word “RCA”, I think the document contains some important things to learn for everyone.
2. While this has been said many, many times over by now in many forms, I take this opportunity to say it one more time in Kyle Evans’ words. Products over Project.
3. Kousik Nath has written a good series of articles on understanding distributed consensus in general and the Raft protocol specifically. Here are parts one and two. This reminded me of another take on this that I had seen some time ago and found very intuitive to understand - here that one too!
4. Matt Bornstein, Martin Casado, and Jennifer Li outline the latest architectural trends in data engineering in this article for Andreesen-Horowitz.

That's it for this week folks. Have a great weekend!

-Kislay