TIL: Migrations

I’m in a training today with Aspect Dev learning about Bazel. Alex Eagle kicked off the session by giving high level advice for migrations. I want to record the high level bits of advice for furture reference:

• Incubate net promoters
• Don’t disrupt workflows
• Change one thing at a time
• Ratchet mechanism
• Gradient ascent (always make things better, might not get to global maximum)
• Close the loop
• Leave the code alone
• Leave few fingerprints
• Patch and PR (eg pnpm’s patch, most (?) bazel rules have patch_args where you can pass patch files)