Jim Bird writes:

Using run-time flags like this isn’t a new idea, certainly not invented at Flickr or Facebook. Using flags and conditional statements to offer different experiences to different users or to turn on code incrementally is something that many people have been practicing for a long time. And doing this in mainline code to avoid branching is in many ways a step back to the way that people built software 20+ years ago when we didn’t have reliable and easy to use code management systems.