A toggle is a small user-interface element that lets people manage the state of something, typically content or a view. They are often used to change the default settings or behavior of a site or app, such as allowing or disabling certain functionality. They can also be used to support experiments or A/B testing. This type of toggle should only be incorporated when it makes sense to do so – in other cases, a popup or another user-interface element may be a more appropriate choice.
In 1996, Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded a search engine that was powered by academic research in natural language processing and information extraction. Their technology ranked web pages based on how many other webpages linked to them, and their new company — which they named Google after the mathematical term “googol,” a number of one followed by 100 zeroes — was an instant hit.
Over time, Google has expanded its offerings and become a juggernaut of the tech industry with an impressive array of products that now include the Android operating system, email, social networking, photo sharing, video streaming, maps, mobile phone services, and more. But the company has faced criticism over a number of other issues, including allegations that it violates people’s privacy and intellectual property rights, its use of energy-hungry servers, and its alleged dominance of online advertising. These criticisms have led to a grassroots movement against Google known as #DisruptGoogle. The movement is also responsible for the creation of the Reddit community r/degoogle, which serves as a hub for users to share tips and resources about how to avoid using Google products.
Feature toggles (also known as feature flags) are a powerful tool in software development that can help teams develop and deploy features at scale. However, they can be problematic if not managed properly. If a team doesn’t have a process for governing the deployment of feature toggles, they can quickly devolve into a tangled mess of conditional logic that makes code harder to read and maintain. Keeping the inventory of feature toggles low and regularly auditing them can prevent this from happening.
Feature toggles can enable teams to release software faster and more efficiently than traditional waterfall processes allow. By enabling developers to hide new features behind toggles until they are ready for production, QA, or market testing, they can free up more time and money that would otherwise be spent on developing and merging code into trunk. In addition, by ensuring that toggles are enabled by default and only active when needed, teams can prevent the accidental activation of unnecessary code paths. This can significantly improve the speed and performance of an application while also improving developer morale by eliminating frustrating merge conflicts. Adding feature toggles to your development workflow can help you accelerate the speed of your deployment pipeline and empower your team to make data-driven decisions with confidence. With a tool like Statsig, you can implement and manage feature toggles quickly and easily to streamline your development cycle.
