Feature toggles (sometimes referred to as feature flags) are an engineering practice aiming to control application behavior without the need to deploy a code change. The behaviors that toggles can affect range from hiding under development features, limited feature release (canary) to a subset of users, or used to switch to fallback implementation in the event of a system issue, and more.

Continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment implementations cover a wide range of automation possibilities for your software. This article will provide an overview of these three principles, the benefits they can bring to your engineering efficiency, and potential challenges.

It has been said that all businesses today are IT businesses. They just happen to make their money selling different things.

Software development and usage of software-driven products are rapidly evolving subject areas. Healthy competition means crafting applications becomes quicker and cheaper over time.

Carpenters have lots of tools to pick from. Drills, impact drivers, circular saws, and miter saws; each tool may be really good for a specific purpose and a great carpenter will know when to use each one.

In the previous architecture spotlight entry, we discussed Event Sourcing and illustrated the concept with a simple banking account example. We laid out many of its pros and cons to help readers decide if the pattern would be useful to them.

Software architecture is the analysis, thought and design considerations that form the foundational scaffolding for a successful software system. If you write software for work or as a hobby, whether you know it or not, you’re already dealing with software architecture and the processes of making architectural decisions within your applications.

Event sourcing is a powerful architectural pattern that records all changes made to an application’s state, in the sequence in which the changes were originally applied. This sequence serves as both the system of record where current state can be sourced from, as well as an audit log of everything that happened within the application over its lifetime.