Feature Preview Deployments for the Front-end
The front-end for “Employee Referrals” — the department where I work — at Radancy is a single page web application, served as static assets by nginx, which also acts as a reverse proxy. The problem Historically, the front-end team at “Employee Referrals” has followed a practice of working on features in long-running git branches, iteratively adding small changes to the branch until the feature is complete, at which point they merge it. While this (somewhat) worked when these front-end developers were part of a dedicated and siloed team, it doesn’t really work well with our new team structure — cross functional teams where front-end and back-end developers work together on product features. The need to wait for merging these long-running branches to the main branch before seeing the corresponding features on our pre-prod environment qa resulted in significant delays. This meant that it took quite a long time before other team members — product owners, testers, other devs — could test out new features and provide feedback. I wanted to get rid of this delay by allowing previews for front-end feature branches. ...