Break Orbit, Not Systems – LaunchDarkly’s First Conference
Tags: devadvocacy, launchdarkly, conferences, technologyconferenc
Published: 2019-02-08 03:22:41

---
title: Break Orbit, Not Systems – LaunchDarkly’s First Conference
published: true
tags: Dev Advocacy,LaunchDarkly,conferences,technology conferenc
canonical_url: http://www.heidiwaterhouse.com/2019/02/05/break-orbit-not-systems-launchdarklys-first-conference/
---

We’re so excited that we have announced our first conference and are actively collecting [talk submissions](https://www.papercall.io/trajectory) and [selling tickets](https://www.trajectoryconf.com/) for it!

We thought you might be interested in hearing why we’ve decided it was the right time for a conference about feature management, feature flagging, testing in production, and trunk-based development.

![](http://www.heidiwaterhouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/image.jpg)

# We want to learn from you!

As the developer advocate, I spend a bunch of my time in the field, going to conference talks and listening to what’s happening in the world. And I know that there are people who are stone-cold experts in flagging systems out there. We want to give you a reason to get together and talk to us, and each other, about what you’ve found out about scale, technical debt, and best practices. We saw that Gremlin’s ChaosConf and Honeycomb’s o11ycon gave practitioners a chance to exchange information and cross-polinate ideas, and we’d like to carry that on. I firmly believe that getting people with a common interest together leads to leaps for the entire category they talk about. Look at DevOpsDays!

# People are hungry for best practices

Sure, I can tell you about what kinds of flag naming schemes work best, but wouldn’t you rather hear it from someone who is doing it at massive scale, and has been for years? Getting people together, from beginners, to people who built their own systems, to our customers who are using us at scale, gives us all a chance to learn and codify best practices. At LaunchDarkly, we feel like this year is an inflection point for feature management adoption, and as a part of that industry, we want to help the best practices apply as broadly as possible. We hope that Trajectory will let us talk about how testing, design, development, release, and sales can all be accelerated and made more powerful. How are you reaching escape velocity? We’d like to hear.

# We think you’re awesome and have great ideas!

We have plans for what direction we’re going to take LaunchDarkly, and what’s next on our wishlist, but we want to make sure it’s going to serve you, our customers and potential customers. It’s no fun building a great technological achievement that doesn’t actually help people.

When people ask me how Edith and John got the idea for Feature Flags as a Service, I always tell them what Edith told me, that she was on so many late-night, weekend deploy bridges that she grew to hate them, and eventually, to build a product that means people can launch and test their software without late-night drama or stress.

We always want to be doing that, making your life easier – so tell us how! We made a wishlist of talks that we hoped would get proposed, but I bet you have ideas on things that you learned that you can talk about or write about. Here are some of the things we thought of:

- Transformation or disaster stories – learning that we need new software to safely operate in this new world
- How we deconstructed a monolith
- How to knock down the cultural barriers and get DevOps/feature flag adoption at massive scale
- GDPR – 1 year after
- The new tech stack for brownfield development
- How to test in production
- The path to continuous delivery

# Other awesomeness

- The venue is at the Oakland Museum of California
- Oakland-based catering is gonna be amazing!
- You! And people like you! And I’m helping pick the swag!

**I hope to see you there!** Tickets are limited, so don’t overthink it!