John Kodumal, CTO and Co-founder of LaunchDarkly

Beyang sits down with John Kodumal, CTO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly. LaunchDarkly is a SaaS feature management platform for developers that allows them to iterate and get code into production quickly and safely by separating feature rollout and code deployment.

John begins by talking about his first experiences with computers and programing in the 80s, including teaching himself to us a Dvorak keyboard in the first grade, experimenting with BBS in elementary school, and programming his TI-92 in BASIC to make a shell program so that he could use Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) on it in high school. John shares how he pursued his interest in programming languages throughout higher education and then discusses his employment experiences at Coverity and Atlassian. He talks about how the lessons and experiences from his prior jobs ultimately led him to found LaunchDarkly in 2014 with former classmate, Edith Harbaugh.

John dives into how did he first got into feature toggles and feature flags, and then talks about the engineering challenges LaunchDarkly has encountered. John concludes by sharing how he has witnessed LaunchDarkly impact the developer experience and the ongoing, transformational benefits of utilizing their feature management platform.

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