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Show HN: Ablator – Switch features on or A/B test them inside your app

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mazatta 9y ago
It looks interesting, and might be something I introduce to my team. Is it possible to define cohorts of users, and then expose features to that group? I work on a SaaS app used by businesses, so it'd be very handy to use this tool when a customer is beta testing a new feature.
- breakthesystem 9y ago
  That's a cool idea. Any ideas how you'd want to distinguish between cohorts?
  - mazatta 9y ago
    If I could set arbitrary key/value on both users and features, that should be enough to make it work.
- pscarey 9y ago
  You can do everything you want with Firebase Remote Config, for free. Can even randomly pick out a % of any analytics audience you create.
huhtenberg 9y ago
Oy vey. What is the problem that you solve that would justify adding a dependency on an external service that shims itself between us and our precious users? Rolling out features to subsets of users in a controlled fashion... it's just a such damn trivial thing to do.
- breakthesystem 9y ago
  Depending on your target platform, you might not have as much control over your releases. On the web, it's easy, but on e.g. iOS, it gets a bit harder. I agree: like error reporting, it's not a hard, unsolvable problem, but it's a problem I had a few times and decided, why reimplement the wheel I could create a helpful open source solution?
- dguo 9y ago
  It's only trivial when your needs are trivial. See https://launchdarkly.com/buildbuy.html https://launchdarkly.com/buildbuy.html At scale, a hosted solution might be justified.
  - edoceo 9y ago
    Many (most?) people are not at that kind of scale, and LD is only at scale as the sum of 1000s of small sites + a few big ones. After using LD for a year I found it expensive, slow, broken. They were cool and gave me a large credit. Now I use a self-hosted "microservice" which works at our scale (100s of users). Feature Flags are only checked on sign in here, so the load on our service is very low. But is in go, which is "fast" and web-scale, right?
    - kristianc 9y ago
      Wow, $79-300 a month is expensive for a feature like that. Not sure who they're targeting at a price point like that - many who can cough up a budget like that for a small point solution are going to have the capacity to build their own.
      - paulddraper 9y ago
        split.io is several times that. IDK about this product, but split.io has more features and better UI than you could get from a handful of engineers working part-time.
  - huhtenberg 9y ago
encoderer 9y ago
Congrats on shipping. I think your copy could use some improvement. Casual professional is a hard tone to do well. Also, this should be a single call for a user where you give me all of the users feature flags. Then I can put it in a session cache and be done with it. These things by design never change for a given user. This is not a technically difficult thing to do (until you reach scale) so I think you will get more return from investing in marketing than development. Gl.
- breakthesystem 9y ago
  Thank you for the encouraging words :) Do you have specific improvement suggestions for copy, or should I just get some people who are good with this and ask them for help? The all users thing is a nice idea. I'll have to think a bit about how it implement this.
  - encoderer 9y ago
    I don't mean get all flags for all users -- I mean your API should return the status of all features for a given user.
    - breakthesystem 9y ago
      Yes! The challenge is, I feel like it'd be a preferable to return all fearures for a given user within an Organisation, as opposed to all features, period. I don't know why I feel that way yet... maybe a security risks? Guess a username, find out about a new secret feature from some Organisation using ablator.
      - encoderer 9y ago
        Surely you have an API key?
        breakthesystem 9y ago
        Not right now, since the functionality ID is just as effectively. But switching to API keys is probably the way to go, and I'll do some work on that over the next days. Btw, I created an issue for that at https://github.com/ablator/ablator/issues/95 https://github.com/ablator/ablator/issues/95
dguo 9y ago
You might want to get this added to http://featureflags.io/ http://featureflags.io/ Good luck. It's good to see some more competition in this space.
- breakthesystem 9y ago
  Awesome, thanks for the tip!
- breakthesystem 9y ago
  At a cursory glance, http://featureflags.io/ http://featureflags.io/ seems to only be a marketing page for LaunchDarkly. I don't see any other server advertised there, and it is obviously built by them. I didn't search that long, but I didn't find a submission link either. So ¯\_(ツ~)_/¯
a13n 9y ago
Is it easy to make something self hostable? It sounds nice, but like it'd slow you down significantly. Now you have to worry about versioning, changelogs??? Worth it?
- breakthesystem 9y ago
  This is actually self hostable. Just get the newest source from github and build yourself a docker container :) Or you can get it hosted if you don't want to worry about changelogs and the like.
breakthesystem 9y ago
Thanks for all your kind words and improvement suggestions! I've started cataloguing them into [tickets on github](https://github.com/ablator/ablator/issues https://github.com/ablator/ablator/issues). Feel free to add more or extend existing ones! :)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

It looks interesting, and might be something I introduce to my team. Is it possible to define cohorts of users, and then expose features to that group? I work on a SaaS app used by businesses, so it'd be very handy to use this tool when a customer is beta testing a new feature.

breakthesystem 9y ago
That's a cool idea. Any ideas how you'd want to distinguish between cohorts?
- mazatta 9y ago
  If I could set arbitrary key/value on both users and features, that should be enough to make it work.
pscarey 9y ago
You can do everything you want with Firebase Remote Config, for free. Can even randomly pick out a % of any analytics audience you create.

huhtenberg 9y ago

Oy vey. What is the problem that you solve that would justify adding a dependency on an external service that shims itself between us and our precious users? Rolling out features to subsets of users in a controlled fashion... it's just a such damn trivial thing to do.

breakthesystem 9y ago
Depending on your target platform, you might not have as much control over your releases. On the web, it's easy, but on e.g. iOS, it gets a bit harder. I agree: like error reporting, it's not a hard, unsolvable problem, but it's a problem I had a few times and decided, why reimplement the wheel I could create a helpful open source solution?
dguo 9y ago
It's only trivial when your needs are trivial. See https://launchdarkly.com/buildbuy.html https://launchdarkly.com/buildbuy.html At scale, a hosted solution might be justified.
- edoceo 9y ago
  Many (most?) people are not at that kind of scale, and LD is only at scale as the sum of 1000s of small sites + a few big ones. After using LD for a year I found it expensive, slow, broken. They were cool and gave me a large credit. Now I use a self-hosted "microservice" which works at our scale (100s of users). Feature Flags are only checked on sign in here, so the load on our service is very low. But is in go, which is "fast" and web-scale, right?
  - kristianc 9y ago
    Wow, $79-300 a month is expensive for a feature like that. Not sure who they're targeting at a price point like that - many who can cough up a budget like that for a small point solution are going to have the capacity to build their own.
    - paulddraper 9y ago
      split.io is several times that. IDK about this product, but split.io has more features and better UI than you could get from a handful of engineers working part-time.
- huhtenberg 9y ago

encoderer 9y ago

Congrats on shipping. I think your copy could use some improvement. Casual professional is a hard tone to do well. Also, this should be a single call for a user where you give me all of the users feature flags. Then I can put it in a session cache and be done with it. These things by design never change for a given user. This is not a technically difficult thing to do (until you reach scale) so I think you will get more return from investing in marketing than development. Gl.

breakthesystem 9y ago
Thank you for the encouraging words :) Do you have specific improvement suggestions for copy, or should I just get some people who are good with this and ask them for help? The all users thing is a nice idea. I'll have to think a bit about how it implement this.
- encoderer 9y ago
  I don't mean get all flags for all users -- I mean your API should return the status of all features for a given user.
  - breakthesystem 9y ago
    Yes! The challenge is, I feel like it'd be a preferable to return all fearures for a given user within an Organisation, as opposed to all features, period. I don't know why I feel that way yet... maybe a security risks? Guess a username, find out about a new secret feature from some Organisation using ablator.
    - encoderer 9y ago
      Surely you have an API key?
      - breakthesystem 9y ago
        Not right now, since the functionality ID is just as effectively. But switching to API keys is probably the way to go, and I'll do some work on that over the next days. Btw, I created an issue for that at https://github.com/ablator/ablator/issues/95 https://github.com/ablator/ablator/issues/95

dguo 9y ago

You might want to get this added to http://featureflags.io/ http://featureflags.io/ Good luck. It's good to see some more competition in this space.

breakthesystem 9y ago
Awesome, thanks for the tip!
breakthesystem 9y ago
At a cursory glance, http://featureflags.io/ http://featureflags.io/ seems to only be a marketing page for LaunchDarkly. I don't see any other server advertised there, and it is obviously built by them. I didn't search that long, but I didn't find a submission link either. So ¯\_(ツ~)_/¯

a13n 9y ago

Is it easy to make something self hostable? It sounds nice, but like it'd slow you down significantly. Now you have to worry about versioning, changelogs??? Worth it?

breakthesystem 9y ago
This is actually self hostable. Just get the newest source from github and build yourself a docker container :) Or you can get it hosted if you don't want to worry about changelogs and the like.

breakthesystem 9y ago

Thanks for all your kind words and improvement suggestions! I've started cataloguing them into [tickets on github](https://github.com/ablator/ablator/issues https://github.com/ablator/ablator/issues). Feel free to add more or extend existing ones! :)