"I just love dealing with migrations!"
-No developer, ever.
Over the past three years, Ariel, my co-founder and I (along with the rest of our team at
Ariga), have been working on Atlas, a database schema-as-code tool.
After many years of building software professionally, we've come to realize that one of the most stressful, tedious and error-prone parts of
building software is dealing with database migrations.
In case you are unfamiliar with the term, database migrations are the process of changing the structure of a database.
When applications evolve, the database schema needs to evolve with them. This is commonly done by writing scripts that
describe the changes to the database schema. These scripts are then executed in order to apply the changes to the database.
This process has earned the name "migrations" and an infamous reputation among developers.
The secret to building a successful tool for developers is to be relentlessly focused on the user experience.
When we started working on Atlas, we spent a long time researching the common issues developers face when dealing with
migrations. We wanted to understand the root causes of these issues and design a tool that would solve them.
In this post, I'll share the top 5 usability issues we identified with migration tools and how we addressed them in Atlas.