Simon Agius Muscat
Fractional DevOps Engineer & Freelance Consultant
Migrating 150 engineers from GitLab to GitHub with only one day of Downtime!
​
Version control and CI/CD systems are often treated as permanent fixtures—until they’re not. What happens when your company must overhaul these critical tools, but can’t afford more than a single day of disruption for 150+ engineers?
In this candid talk, dive into Hotjar’s high-stakes migration journey: a full switch from GitLab to GitHub executed in just 24 hours, with zero customer impact and minimal friction for engineers. Learn how they turned a seemingly impossible task into a blueprint for seamless DevOps transformation.
Key Takeaways:
The Soft Skills: Aligning stakeholders, managing team anxiety, and communicating clearly under pressure.
The Hard Skills: Automating migration steps, rewriting CI/CD pipelines, and ensuring airtight rollback plans.
The Guts: Leading with conviction, making tough calls, and maintaining momentum when the clock is ticking.
Whether you’re a tech lead eyeing a toolchain overhaul or an engineer tasked with “the impossible,” this session will equip you with strategies to minimize downtime without sacrificing code integrity, preserve engineer productivity during critical transitions and build stakeholder confidence in high-risk, high-reward projects.
About Simon ...
Simon is a Software Engineer working at the intersection of Software Engineering, DevOps, and AI.
He has a keen interest in how software teams operate efficiently and effectively within their business domain. With experience spanning both small startups and large-scale products, Simon now takes on fractional roles to help companies navigate and succeed in the modern software landscape.
A strong advocate for remote work, he frequently shares his insights through blogging and public speaking.