Update Feature Flags with Capistrano and Rake

After you have feature flags setup in your app, you’re likely to want to enable/disable them easily. Frequently this is done on more of an ad-hoc basis and doesn’t necessarily warrant an interface from within your app. This sort of ad-hoc activity is a good match for Rake and Capistrano.

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Using Feature Flags to Manage App Updates with Rails and Mongoid

When you have a new feature for your web application, you frequently want to manage how it is rolled out. It’s always a good idea to only release the feature to a small group of customers as this will help you make sure that it is working as it should. Additionally, you can use feature flags […]

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Handling 404’s Gracefully

You can spend countless hours working on your website, tuning and tweaking as much as you can. You can link check and scan and editorialize every page. But you will still get 404’s. It may be from typos in links from other sites. It may be from retiring or renaming a page. It may simply […]

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Simulating Limited Bandwidth

Recently I was dealing with an issue where some JS ran fine locally, but not on a staging server. I tracked the problem down to a bandwidth issue – images loaded lightning fast locally but were slow on the staging server and that caused my problems. In order to solve the problem I needed to […]

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Cross-Browser QA on Mobile

There are 3 main approaches to mobile QA: Use a physical device Use a local emulator Use a hosted service We’ll discuss all three options and then focus on the sorts of things that you should QA on a mobile device which are the same no matter which approach you take for a testing environment.

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