[Tiquor]

I like how one of the oldest concepts in programming, the ifdef, has now become (if you read the press) a "revolutionary idea" created by Facebook and apparently the core of a company's business. I'm only being a little sarcastic.

[arielweisberg]

Being able to merge in progress development to your main branch is an important part of reducing product in development and reducing cycle time. When dealing with big features that aren't going to reach a viable end user visible state for months to years it can be a real challenge especially when what your are working on feels like a it "touches everything."

This is more than just the technical capability. I've been on teams that insist they are completely unable to iteratively develop and deliver big features. As a result you end up with huge impossible to review patch drops at the ends of months of work behind closed doors. It's a disaster every time.

I'm still struggling to communicate to people how to do it and what the benefits are.

[Tiquor]

I'm well aware of the concept and have been doing this for years in my company's web apps. My sarcasm comes from seeing this covered as a revolution in software engineering as opposed to the application of some rather old concepts with new UI and broader application.

[jkodumal]

CTO of LaunchDarkly here. We kind of embrace it a little bit-- locavore booleans as a service.

But the real power behind the idea is not the ifdef piece, it's the idea of dynamic, context-aware configuration. You've got a user-friendly tool that can control the code paths being executed in your application without restarts or redeploys.

[shortstuffsushi]

Read: it's not ifdefs, it's shiny UI wrapped around them! All well and good (I appreciate a good UI), but certainly not "new."