Case Study: Thorn safely sunsets legacy systems with Sourcegraph

Thorn sunsets legacy applications safely with Sourcegraph

Thorn, a nonprofit that builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse, needed a safer way to sunset legacy applications without risking production stability. Their teams struggled to identify which code still depended on deprecated systems across many repositories, branches, and microservices, and existing tools like local clones and grep were too slow and incomplete for the job. Sourcegraph’s multi-repository code search was used to help Thorn verify legacy dependencies across the organization.

With Sourcegraph, Thorn synced its repositories in minutes and quickly searched code across all repositories and branches to confirm when references to deprecated systems were gone. The tool became part of the code review process, with pull requests linking to Sourcegraph searches as proof that changes were safe to merge. As a result, Thorn retired deprecated systems without downtime, reduced technical debt across application code, build, deployment, logging, and monitoring, and helped protect production stability.

Thorn

Jacob Gillespie

Software Engineer