Flyway at Redgate – meet the team
So Flyway has joined the Redgate stable…
A quick word of introduction – I’m Julia Hayward, I’ve been a software engineer for 26 years, four of those at Redgate, and I’ll be looking after Flyway. This is my first blog on flywaydb.org, and after a week of learning my way around the whole of Flyway’s code, I’m realising just what a hard act Axel will be to follow. I first came across Flyway at a hackathon week a few years ago and recall being impressed by how easy it was to get up and running, and how many databases it worked with that I’d never even heard of at the time. To now be taking the reins at this exciting time is a real privilege.
Flyway will have its own dedicated team to continue Axel’s awesome work. Jonny Roberts will be running all the business aspects of Flyway, Tey Peryie will be looking after marketing Flyway, while Alex Tercete, Mikiel Agutu and I are software engineers at various stages of our careers who all have experience working on database tools both within Redgate and elsewhere. We have a range of other people to call on for their expertise in other areas, as well as Axel himself for the months ahead before he heads off for a very well earned rest.
Observers might naturally expect that Flyway will have to earn its keep amongst the many other Redgate products, and, given Redgate’s history in the SQL Server market, that we will concentrate on our one “favourite” database to the exclusion of others. However, we are determined that we will not fall into this trap! Flyway has succeeded by catering for a wide range of databases, and we’re committed to sticking to that principle. And on a personal level the most important factor that attracted me to the team was the ability to venture well outside my technical comfort zone and work with unfamiliar technology. We decided that our intention would be:
To make Flyway the ubiquitous open source database migrations framework, by supporting the needs of development teams in evolving database schemas. We succeed by delivering a strategy that ensures the community edition of Flyway can continue to grow, and that supports Redgate’s purpose – reliably solving our users’ problems with ingeniously simple software – and Database DevOps solution.
Put another way, the ongoing commercial success of the Pro and Enterprise versions of Flyway is all well and good, and we’re well aware that other teams within Redgate are keen to make use of the Flyway engine in their tools, but we will have failed if the open-source version and the community around it wither away as a result. Our focus will be to do everything we can to help and grow that community. That means not only carrying on the great work that Axel currently does, but also cultivating Redgate’s participation in the wider open-source world. We don’t have a long history in open-source, and it will be a learning experience for us. We will get it wrong sometimes. We will be as transparent as possible when we do get it wrong. And we hope you, the Flyway community, will put us right.
In the short term, we will be working closely with Axel to enable as smooth a transition as possible, to pick up support and review current contributions, to finish and ship v6.0 and define what the future v6.1 will look like. We have a number of exciting ideas for driving Flyway forwards and we’ll share those plans very soon. In the meantime, do keep telling us what you want Flyway to be – we’ll be listening at @flywaydb!
– Julia