Exploring Development With Runtime Controls @ WeWork NY

We are excited to announce that Unleash's CTO, Ivar Østhus, will be joining us in NYC to discuss feature development in the modern landscape with the help of runtime control mechanisms, feature flags, and best practices overall. Please feel free to stop down and introduce yourself and enjoy the good vibes and discussions.

The space should be opening at 5pm but we'll hold off until approximately 5:30pm to start presenting. We're aiming to provide some tasty food as well and will carry on with discussions as long as we can keep it going.

🕰 Schedule:

• 5:00 - Doors open, time for snacks 🌮
• 5:30 - Welcome and announcements 🤝
• 6:00 - 🎙 "Feature releases should be imperfect - Integrating design thinking and iterations into software design" - Ivar Østhus (CTO, Unleash)
• 6:40 - Q&A + announcements from Unleash
• 7:00 - Hang out and chat 🤗
• 8:00 - Doors close 👋

==============================================

🎙 Ivar Østhus (CTO, Unleash) - "Feature releases should be imperfect - Integrating design thinking and iterations into software design"

Building software often targets perfection. It never gets there. Often it’s because of the user. Questions we encounter after releasing new features can sound like this:

• Have we really understood the users' needs? Is our solution solving their problems in an intuitive way?
• Have we considered all technical aspects? Can there still be edge cases we did not foresee, impacting the quality of our product?

In other words, users are fickle, users change their minds, and users are impossible to predict completely. In addition we often underestimate the complexity of integrating new functionality into existing systems.

We might have ideas, hypotheses and user inputs on what a good solution could look like. But in the end it's hard to know if it solves the problem in a meaningful way with the right level of quality, before we have enabled a feature in production and collected the feedback we need.

In this talk I will present how we build features in iterations at Unleash. I will explain how our iterative approach enables us to gather feedback as part of our development process. And how a good solution is never done, but exists in a robust feedback loop.

Ivar Østhus is the CTO, Founder and Creator of Unleash, the Open Source feature management solution. Based in Norway, he’s a huge fan of the show Succession and full-time dad alongside building his own company. He has been a developer and an architect with a problem solving ethic for over 12 years. He loves to help people in the dev community to find solutions to difficult problems.

About Unleash:
Unleash: Deploy new features at incredible speed Ship code safely to production in frequent smaller releases to control new feature rollouts and reduce cost, time, and risk. Use feature flags to decouple deployment from release.

See you there! 👋