Presentation: Paying Technical Debt at Scale - Migrations @Stripe

Track: Architectures You've Always Wondered About

Location: Ballroom A

Duration: 4:10pm - 5:00pm

Day of week: Tuesday

Level: Intermediate

Persona: Architect, Backend Developer, Technical Engineering Manager

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Abstract

Migrations are both essential and frustratingly frequent as your codebase ages and your business grows: most tools and processes only support about one order of magnitude of growth before becoming ineffective, so rapid growth makes them a way of life. 
Two of Stripe’s most important migrations have been typing our Ruby codebase and migrating our metrics and dashboard stack. This talk will explore why migrations are the only mechanism to effectively manage technical debt as your company and code grows, what makes running them so hard, and a repeatable approach to running them effectively: 

  1. derisking the migration by testing the approach
  2. enabling the migration with documentation, tools and self-service to make it go as quickly as possible, and 
  3. finishing the thing. 

If you're already languishing in technical debt and are afraid to even consider how you'll dig out, this talk is for you.

Speaker: Will Larson

Foundation Engineering @Stripe

 
Will Larson leads Stripe’s Foundation Engineering team, which provides the reliable, performant and usable platforms and tools for Stripe’s engineers and users. At Stripe, he’s had the opportunity to be part of their development of Veneur and Sorbet, migrations to Kubernetes, Envoy and Bazel, as well as providing the infrastructure for the launch exciting new products like Terminal and Issuing. Prior to Stripe, Will supported engineering teams at Uber and Digg.

Find Will Larson at

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