Engineering Leadership1 min read
Trunk-Based Development With Feature Flags — Operating Notes
By Priyatham Rama Sai
Long-lived branches hid integration pain until merge week. Short-lived branches plus flags let us integrate daily while dark-launching risky flows — but flag hygiene became its own discipline when hundreds accumulated.
Prerequisites
Solid CI, backwards-compatible migrations, and kill switches for risky paths. Flags do not replace design for rollback.
Lifecycle
TTL reviews removed zombie flags that randomly enabled half-done experiments in prod during unrelated deploys — yes, it happened.
Culture
Reviewers ask ‘flag plan?’ like they ask for tests — defaults train habit.