for the love of god: please setup preview deployments

preview deployments saved our software team.

well, not quite literally, but we're now getting double, tripple the feedback speed than without them. if you don't have preview deployments, you're missing out bigggg time on compounded feedback cycles!

and in today's environment, speed is really everything!

before we had preview deployments our product and engineering loops were completely out of sync. it took weeks to get proper feedback from product or early users.

now, we have a staggered approach. preview deployments hit the internal testers. after we have maxed out and improved the features, ui and ux, we often just ship it directly to prod.

but for bigger improvements, or complete redesigns (like a memory feature in cosma), we put it behind a feature-flag that our users can self-enroll. that way feedback slowly but surely trickles in from our power-users, who don't mind trying something new, which may not be perfectly polished

(for feature flags and a bunch of other stuff, please checkout PostHog, what an incredible platform!)

now, with previews and feature flags, we have a smooth and solid workflow. an example:

for cosma, Pasquale whipped up a new feature for our self-service dashboard for our customers/users to see exactly what we're charging and why. with the automatic preview (automatically triggered by a new git branch), i can quickly drop in on version 0, visit the live version; play around with it, try it out and guide the process in a nice direction!

it's the biggest unlock we had in our team in terms of engineering velocity (again, with the fancy words nicolai 🙄)

check out the screenshot below: that's just the last 24h in one of our projects at apex by COSMO CONSULT!

now, if you only read one thing, read this:

PS: please implement preview deployments, you'll ship so much more effectively and faster, you would not believe me!