Tern Stories

IBM was dropping RethinkDB support. No migration path. No alternatives. Just an end date.

Andy Monroe's team at LaborChart had five engineers and an entire construction scheduling platform built on a database that was already dead. They'd watched every other RethinkDB hosting provider shut down, leaving only Compose.io.

When IBM acquired Compose, they knew it was just a matter of time.

Andy's air conditioning had died two hours before our interview. It was 90 degrees in Kansas, and as we talked about this moment, the irony wasn't lost on either of us.

The company he'd helped build solved scheduling problems for construction workers—the very people who might have fixed his AC. Now he had a different kind of emergency to handle.

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Connect with Andy! - andymonroe.dev

Back in 2011, PagerDuty had a problem that would make any infrastructure engineer wince: they were using MySQL as a queue. 

In this episode, we dive into the fascinating journey of using Cassandra as a queue, the challenges faced, and the lessons learned along the way.

Arup Chakrabarti, former Senior Director of Engineering at PagerDuty, shares his insights on the early days of the company, the technical decisions made, and how they navigated the complexities of using a NoSQL database in unconventional ways.

Check out Arup's work! ➡️ arupchak.com

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In this episode of Turn Stories, I dive deep into my experiences with Bobby Grayson, the first engineer at Quantierra, a YC-backed startup.

Bobby shares his journey from the chaos of WeWork to the unique challenges of a small startup, where he faced a messy codebase and low reliability. 

We discuss the impressive app he helped build, which aggregates vast amounts of data from New York City, and how he transformed the system to better support users' workflows.

If you're curious about the intersection of technology and real estate, or if you're an engineer looking for inspiration on tackling complex projects, this episode is a must-listen. Join us as we explore the future of software development and the exciting possibilities that lie ahead.

Connect with Bobby! ➡️ https://bsky.app/profile/bobbby.online

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In this episode, Cooper Bethea, a senior staff engineer at Slack, shares his journey of transforming Slack's architecture to a cellular model, allowing for more resilient operations.

Cooper recounts the frustrations of dealing with outages and the decision-making process that led to the migration to a cellular architecture. He explains how the initial struggles with service discovery and load balancing prompted a reevaluation of their infrastructure.

The key insight was that draining an AZ should not be a rare, high-stakes event but rather a routine operation that could be executed with confidence. Cooper discusses the importance of incremental changes and how they were able to practice draining traffic from AZs during peaceful times, ultimately leading to a more robust system.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in infrastructure, reliability, and the challenges of scaling systems in a cloud environment.

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Connect with Cooper ➡️ https://www.linkedin.com/in/cooper-bethea-521936201/

In this episode of Tern Stories, I spoke with Maude Lemaire about a migration that started with SQL and ended with people taking shifts at dawn.  

She joined Slack less than two years out of college, and within months, she was leading a core part of the company’s efforts to keep up with their biggest customer, IBM. The project: unifying Slack’s channel membership model—one of the most central, performance-sensitive parts of the product.

At one point, the system was so fragile that engineers had to be in the office at 6 A.M. every day, just to watch IBM’s login spike and make sure the system didn’t collapse.  

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Go check out what Maude does! ➡️ https://maudethecodetoad.com/  

Her book, Refactoring at Scale, is available now 📖: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/refactoring-at-scale/9781492075523/  

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If you’ve worked on more than one code migration, you already know the punchline: none of them are the same.  

Sure, it sounds like a React 17 → 18 upgrade should follow the same plan for everyone.   

But a real-world code migration always find a way to be uniquely painful. Your app uses different corners of the library.  

Your plugin stack has its own fingerprint.  

Your engineers wrote some “just for now” code that’s still running five years later.  

Whatever you thought the code migration would be, it won’t be.  

This was one of the biggest takeaways in a recent episode of Tern Stories, where we looked inward for once.  

My cofounder Ryan and I talked through what we’ve seen in our own migrations and the ones we’ve supported across companies.  

Despite the variety, a few consistent truths emerged.

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Alright, picture this. It's March 2020. Everybody just went to work from home. You work at Slack, which is suddenly one of three applications keeping the entire business world connected.  And nobody owns Memcache.  

Today's episode of Turn Stories is with Glen Sanford, who decided he was going to own Memcache and he was going to migrate it.  

I am stretching that word today.  

Whether you're an aspiring engineer or a seasoned professional, Glen's insights will inspire you to take ownership of your projects and strive for continuous improvement!

In this episode of Turn Stories, I sit down with Anthony Sottile, who led Lyft's migration from Python 2 to 3.  They did 150 services in less than six months. But what stood out wasn't just the scale or the timeline, it was the approach.  

They really leaned on tooling so they could ratchet progress forward, and then they'd lock it in with CI rules so nothing backslid.  

They would ship automated PRs, and if nobody complained but nobody looked at them, they would just purge them, and they trusted their infrastructure.  

They would do deployments where even if there were errors, they knew the system would retry, and there wouldn't be any user visible impact.  

And that made for a really powerful migration story. So we talk about what worked, we talk about what didn't, and some of the most hilarious failures across a couple of key services.  -----  

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Go subscribe to Anthony! ➡️ https://www.youtube.com/anthonywritescode

“If I could wipe out one technology? TCP/IP.”  

 That was Mike Jervis’ answer. He was half-joking. Sort of.   

Mike’s a cybersecurity and privacy lawyer at Mullen Coughlin. He works with companies after the worst has happened—when ransomware locks down production, customer data is exfiltrated, and legal deadlines start ticking. His job is to figure out what broke, what the law demands, and how to respond.  

This episode of Tern Stories is about the aftermath of a breach. What’s surprising isn’t just the chaos—it’s how much of the outcome hinges on infrastructure, habits, and technical decisions made months or years before the incident.  

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What does it take to replace the core data store at a company like Datadog? 

That's the question I asked Ian Noland, who led Datadog's migration from Elasticsearch to a new system called Husky.  

In this insightful conversation, Ian shares the challenges and triumphs of this monumental task, including why APM was the first product to move, how they used Kafka to run both systems in parallel, and the importance of deliberately preserving a system's bugs.  

Join us as we delve into the world of observability and data management, and discover how Ian and his team successfully navigated this challenging journey.  

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