I was just having the build vs buy conversation with my team this week. AI does make building much easier - which changes the argument some. But it doesn't eliminate the maintenance and all the other overhead that goes with infrastructure like this. Let someone else, like unleash, deal with all that and focus on what makes your product unique.
Makes me think of "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Great sci-fi series about spiders, crows, and squid evolving and traveling into space. Very different take on space travel. The crows there learn to work as a pair to do advanced tasks.
Not squid, octipodes. Anyway, he does an excellent job of extrapolating from the actual quirks of each animal into a culture and then playing with how those cultures would or wouldn't get along.
Cheers fellow nerd! I like to pronounce it so that it rhymes with Parmenides, and then imagine that they have a society full of aquatic philosophers (I'm a bit out of step with Tchaikovsky's view on that front).
The point isn't that React is dead tech. React is practically every AIs front-end library of choice. I think the idea is AI is too good at it and you won't get a good ROI learning it. Learn fundamentals instead and when folks get sick of React because AI loves it, you'll be ready.
If you're working with C#, Microsoft added first class support for feature management in .Net with https://github.com/microsoft/featuremanagement-dotnet. It provides the logic for simple on/off, user targeting, percentage roll outs, and schedules. Using feature management along with flags hardcoded in `appSettings.json` makes perfect sense for a simpler application.
When your architecture grows and you start needing to synchronize configuration across multiple applications, or have non-technical users change flags, then you've probably outgrown hardcoding and need to consider building (or buying) a service. You probably don't want product owners trying to set an env var like `FeatureManagement__NewFeature__EnabledFor__0__Name`. Azure App Configuration is the go to if you're willing to use Azure - it provides a nice UI for editing flags instead of dealing with JSON. Or, I've been building https://featureflags.app/ as an alternative provider if you prefer to steer clear of Azure. Its kinda the middle ground between hard coding and a full on platform like LaunchDarkly.
There are many options in this space. But if you don't want to roll your own provider, the only way to use Microsoft's management solution is via Azure. Or try to manage it all via json files - which potentially require infrastructure to manage if you have a more complex architecture. Some developers prefer to avoid using Azure, and this provides the infrastructure they need.
This way of thinking is absolutely still around. I think AI may actually be making it worse. Now managers have it to validate their ideas and they don't think they have to listen to feedback from subordinates because some AI agrees with them.
I've spent a few months building a simple feature management system for .NET - https://featureflags.app. The .NET built in feature management libraries work pretty well. But I wanted an easy to use UI for configuring flags - without having to use Azure.
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