This is the first part of an upcoming series documenting the migration of databases from MongoDB to Postgres. The team planned and executed the changes over six weeks with zero incidents, choosing Postgres for its stability, maturity, and speed. To make the local development environment pleasant, they set up a local database and automated most basic operations using internal packages and scripting. The application tier consists of Node.js-based services written in Typescript, and scripts were created to automate common interactions with the database, including provisioning, psql shells, migrations, and importing data from staging or production instances. To make the tooling easy to use, they made it fail quickly and loudly when applicable, providing helpful warnings for missing configurations, and abstracted infrastructure knowledge through a proxy tunnel. The upfront investment was well worth it, as it enabled efficient migration up, debugging, rollback, or starting from scratch with just a few commands.