“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 Litigation Teaches Us About Security Operations | Ep. 5

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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Outscaling ElasticSearch at Datadog | Ep. 4

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.  

Get Tern Stories in your inbox: https://tern.sh/youtube [https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbnZCWjNHTExNQVRuWm45b2RQZ05TZG9QczZqZ3xBQ3Jtc0tsYjBRcWc4ZmNTTzdOSldlaHdkbjBiZVBZNEpXdXVHeGtncGRKRHpwNFpwQ2dBY01CZVltRWZFMjBrZ3p5ZmtuU0cxdVBJVVVxZXRzWHFjckRsLXl4Mm1KcTJyMENKb2lQclBDUmlfQ1hBdHo5cVk3WQ&q=https%3A%2F%2Ftern.sh%2Fyoutube&v=1fOW3THZHOo]

Upgrading Postgres: 5 Versions Behind, 4 Databases to Merge | Ep. 03

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

Quitting CoffeeScript? First Teach Everybody Typescript | Ep. 02

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.  

Get Tern Stories in your inbox: https://tern.sh/youtube [https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqa21qZVE0b2pTOEZyT21LY1c0WC1sLUpvdjkwUXxBQ3Jtc0ttZExlR3RaY01DeGh5azBsYnJteVZ0X3JTRFJreFNvOXB0eG45UnEyT2RmTDVYUzN4cEdSY0ZYWV8ybVBES09VV0dMcnhQVVF5c1lxaFZQUkZoQml3SWI5ZUdUbUtHa0VYQ3NCYkxuZXM3X2FqNldjdw&q=https%3A%2F%2Ftern.sh%2Fyoutube&v=nYVVmDIZKuw]

The Human Side of Code Migration | Ep. 01

The future of AI isn’t just new code; it’s evolving the code you already have. Tern Stories is conversations with engineers about how tackled their toughest migrations.

Want to tell your migration story, or learn how to make your migrations fast, safe, and predictable? Say hi at hello@tern.sh. 