Tern Stories

When Postgres 11 approached end-of-life, a major travel company brought in site reliability engineer Ninad Pundalik to lead the upgrade. The setup: multiple Ruby on Rails apps, with multiple Postgres 11 instances on AWS RDS. No in-house infra team.  

No clear ownership. Some tables still in use, others long forgotten.  

Despite the uncertainty, the migration went smoothly. The team cut over cleanly, avoided downtime, and ended up with a simpler, more reliable setup than they started with.  

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Hal Anil, Staff Engineer at Braze, joined just as the company hit a turning point: KnockOutJS and CoffeeScript were no longer cutting it. In this episode of Tern Stories, Hal walks through how they migrated to React and TypeScript—without pausing product work or losing developer trust.

We talk about:
• Why they started with workshops, not code
• How a single collapsible UI unlocked momentum
• The real value of tooling (hint: it’s not automation)
• Making migrations feel safe, even exciting

Yesterday, I got the chance to talk with Matt Ouille about their code migration of a critical internal service, their service catalog, and how they moved it from a struggling Python monolith to an event-driven architecture.   

This code migration journey was not just a technical challenge; it was a transformative experience that turned reluctant stakeholders into enthusiastic champions of change.   

If you've ever felt trapped by tech debt or wondered how real-world teams overcome messy scaling problems, this episode is for you.  

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