Case Study: Accelerating SDK development across an array of programming languages

Service areas

Custom Software Development

Technology stack

Haskell Erlang Python Ruby Node.js PHP C Open Source

Organization

LaunchDarkly

LaunchDarkly empowers teams to selectively test and deploy software through its feature management platform. The company was searching for a development partner to accelerate feature rollouts in the software development kits (SDKs) they publish. The company publishes SDKs for numerous languages to enable developers using the LaunchDarkly platform to more easily integrate its functionality into their own code bases.

LaunchDarkly approached Foxhound Systems for our expertise in building software in a wide number of programming languages, namely Haskell, as well as our past experience publishing open source packages.

Fast, scalable feature flag and toggle management.

Why Foxhound Systems?

There are three primary reasons why LaunchDarkly chose to work with Foxhound Systems.

Our expertise with the Haskell programming language, allowing us to both work on and make suggestions for improving the code in the Haskell LaunchDarkly SDK.

Our experience with a wide array of technologies and programming languages, allowing us to assist with numerous ongoing SDK development efforts, beyond just Haskell.

Our past experience publishing open source packages.

Engagement objectives

Assist LaunchDarkly’s SDK team in achieving feature parity in key SDKs that the company publishes for developers.

LaunchDarkly publishes SDKs for their feature flag platform in over 20 programming languages. The target is for all SDKs should maintain feature parity while respecting the idioms of the programming language they are written in.
In each SDK, write tests for newly ported features and improve existing tests.

LaunchDarkly leans heavily into unit testing for SDK behavior verification, with the goal being that all SDK feature behaviors are verified in the respective test suite of the SDK.
Write documentation suitable for open source package distribution describing APIs and behaviors.

With the final goal of each SDK feature being apart of an open source release, LaunchDarkly strives to maintain excellent source code documentation in all published SDKs, allowing developers to read and understand the source code more easily.

Partnership outcomes

Foxhound Systems helped LaunchDarkly’s SDK engineering team accelerate SDK development and bring features to several different language SDKs, including Haskell, Ruby, Python, Node.js, Erlang, PHP, and C.

Our team provided SDK design guidance and feedback for certain SDKs to help LaunchDarkly publish code that reflects its respective language idioms.

Our team wrote extensive tests to verify SDK feature behaviors.

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