Simon Schrottner is an open source enthusiast and software engineer currently working at Dynatrace. He's deeply involved with OpenFeature, contributing to its growth in the open source community while also driving its internal adoption at Dynatrace. As a CNCF ambassador, Simon advocates for cloud native technologies and helps foster community engagement, a role he earned largely through his contributions to OpenFeature. Though Simon's roots lie in the Java ecosystem, his current work spans multiple languages – including Golang, Java, JavaScript, and more recently, Python – to support OpenFeature across a broad tech stack.
Feature flags have the potential to revolutionize the software delivery lifecycle, enabling teams to decouple releases from deployments and create a more agile development process. They're often hailed as one of the key practices in modern software development—at least in theory.
In practice, however, the reality has been far less appealing. Vendor lock-in, poor observability, and limited functionality have created such friction that many teams have simply retreated to environment variables. Yet this compromise means missing out on feature flags' true power: reducing the blast radius of bugs, gaining deeper production insights, and empowering everyone across the software delivery lifecycle to contribute meaningfully.
The OpenFeature community is changing this narrative by tackling these challenges head-on. With vendor-agnostic SDKs and a suite of powerful tools, OpenFeature makes feature flagging accessible and practical—without the traditional pain points. Join me as we explore why feature flagging deserves a second chance and discover how OpenFeature can finally bring the fun back into this critical aspect of software development.
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