migrations

Simon Willison discusses influential blog posts that have shaped his thinking in software engineering, including works by Joel Spolsky, Will Larson, and Charity Majors.

Simon Willison argues that completely rewriting legacy systems from scratch rarely succeeds and typically results in two parallel systems in production. He recommends shoring up the old system with automated testing and targeted refactors instead, citing Will Larson's writing on migrations as the best responsible approach.

A tech commentator notes that success stories about rewrites and migrations published by companies are half-truths, omitting negatives and internal incentives, and warns that copying them without understanding context leads to disappointment.

sqlite-utils 4.0 introduces database schema migrations, nested transactions, and compound foreign keys, making it easier to manage SQLite database schema changes programmatically.

sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 is a release candidate that adds built-in database migrations (ported from sqlite-migrate) and nested transactions via db.atomic(), along with minor backwards-incompatible changes.