Features through flags

Wasting time on the 'net is one of my favourite things to do, especially when I'm learning new things. I stumbled upon the flickr developer blog and a post about how they use source control: features enabled using flags. Here's one quoe that I found really interesting:

Flickr is somewhat unique in that it uses a code repository with no branches; everything is checked into head, and head is pushed to production several times a day. This works well for bug fixes that we want to go out immediately, but presents a problem when weíre working on a new feature that takes several months to complete. How do we solve that problem? With flags and flippers!

For a site that has a huge load in hits as well as content, this really surprised me. My first thought was "wow, you have to really trust your developers" followed up with a general "wow". At work from the code commit to going to prod it usually involves much more process and work that I think is worth. I'm all for pushing for shorting the feedback loop so that the developers know about problems right away, but the scale of this shortness had never occured to me for a large and "corporate" site like flickr.

This kind of thinking, feedback, and speed is what Ryan was always trying to get me to see. This type of thing is what he would say "would leave everyone else behind who couldn't keep up".