Presentation: Paying Technical Debt at Scale - Migrations at Stripe

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.