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2019 update: this essay has been updated on my personal site, together with a followup on how to get started
2020 update: I'm now writing a book with updated versions of all these essays and 35 other chapters!!!!
If there's a golden rule, it's this one, so I put it first. All the other rules are more or less elaborations of this rule #1.
You already know that you will never be done learning. But most people "learn in private", and lurk. They consume content without creating any themselves. Again, that's fine, but we're here to talk about being in the top quintile. What you do here is to have a habit of creating learning exhaust. Write blogs and tutorials and cheatsheets. Speak at meetups and conferences. Ask and answer things on Stackoverflow or Reddit. (Avoid the walled gardens like Slack and Discourse, they're not public). Make Youtube videos
(I'm enjoying doing these raw, barely edited writeups; I hope they're useful to you too)
This is my own writeup on feature flags; for a deep dive I'd recommend something like Martin Fowler's article (https://martinfowler.com/articles/feature-toggles.html).
So. Feature flags. The basic idea that you'll store configuration/values on a database/service somewhere, and by changing those values, you can change the user experience/features for a user on the fly.
Let's say that you're building a new feature, called 'new-button' which changes the color of buttons, which is currently red, to blue. Then you'd change code that looks like this -
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