Ryan Trontz
TINDER - Senior Software Engineer, Backend Platform
Ryan Trontz is a Senior Software Engineer on the Backend Platform team at Tinder. A lifelong learner and former educator, Ryan brings over a decade of teaching experience to his engineering work. He's passionate about building tools, processes, and documentation that don't just solve problems, but make his coworkers fundamentally better learners and technical problem solvers.
Presentations
At Tinder, modernizing our backend platform means tackling two major challenges at once: the code and the coder.
In this talk, we’ll share how Tinder built its “upgrade muscle” through repeatable, increasingly automated platform initiatives, and how OpenRewrite helped make that possible. We’ll anchor the story in two migrations: our first Java upgrade, which exposed the limits of manual coordination at scale, and our Java 17 + Spring Boot 3 effort — where we leaned hard on automation to keep change boring and predictable.
We’ll then zoom in on the Java 17 and Spring Boot 3 upgrade, starting with a critical testing dependency migration. By authoring a custom OpenRewrite recipe to migrate unit tests from JMockit to Mockito, we refactored thousands of tests across our backend codebase and completed the effort in roughly a month, without widespread manual changes or developer disruption.
We’ll close by showing how OpenRewrite has evolved into a continuous platform tool at Tinder, enabling safe, large-scale refactoring over time. Attendees will learn how to combine deterministic refactoring tools like OpenRewrite with LLMs in a complementary, cost-effective way, and how to apply that approach to build a sustainable, developer-friendly upgrade strategy.