Have you ever experienced the pain of a hard-coded “constant” that needs to change sometimes? Maybe it’s your application’s version number, stored as a string constant.

If you’re lucky, you remember to update it every single time it needs updating. But let’s be serious — nobody is that lucky. More likely, you forget to rev it and you break a build or else QA catches it during their testing. If you’re less lucky, it slips through to production and makes your life miserable.

The worst part isn’t the bug or even the angry users. The worst part is that, on top of those other problems, you know that you could fix it in five seconds. You know exactly where that constant sits in the code, exactly what it needs to be, and exactly how you would do it.

But you can’t just do that, can you? Updating that one, stupid constant requires a code change. And a code change requires a new build, a new round of testing, and a new deployment. All of that just to change literally one character that you overlooked.

Remote Variable and Constant Configuration to the Rescue

You’d think someone would have solved that problem by now. Well, it turns out that someone has.

Feature flag management systems exist to help you manage feature flags. And, while this might make you think of sequences of Boolean value, you can do other things besides. These can take the form of integers, decimals and, yes, even strings. So you can turn that maddening constant into something that you can manage as data.

Of course, you can handle that particular use case without the feature flag management system, tucking in into a config file somewhere or reading it from a database. But can you do that neatly from a dashboard, specifically designed for this sort of configuration? Can you vary its value by target groups or other custom settings? And can you do all of that without writing any of the code for it yourself?

With Rollout, you can modify the values of application constants and variables on the fly, remotely, in highly configurable ways. No more forgetting to rev a number somewhere or to change a connection string’s value at a certain time. Take control of these concerns once and for all.