Growing Your Toolkit From Refactoring to Automated Migrations

Learn advanced techniques for managing technical debt through automated migrations in this conference talk from C++Now 2025. Explore the evolution from basic refactoring to sophisticated automated migration systems that can handle large-scale codebase transformations. Discover practical definitions, proven techniques, and real-world lessons from implementing truly automated migrations in production environments. Gain specific guidance for planning and executing automated migrations, including common pitfalls to avoid and unexpected success stories from the field. Understand how to build more powerful primitives for keeping technical debt under control as codebases grow and age. The presentation draws from extensive experience at Google leading the Software Ecosystems organization and includes insights from designing language and library features specifically for migration purposes. Access accompanying slides and learn from an expert who has directly planned and executed multiple migrations of previously unapproachable difficulty, including work that influenced Rust's std::collections::HashMap and Go's map implementations.