astar.inc is a mission-based learning platform. Students complete "missions" that build toward a final project — think Duolingo but for full-stack engineering.
They deploy 23 times per week. Their workflow: every PR gets a preview environment with a branched copy of their production database, Slack-notified to the reviewer.
Before pxxl, previews took 8 minutes to build and the database was shared across all previews — so schema migrations blocked the whole team. Now previews are ready in 42 seconds and each one gets its own branched DB.
"Database branching was the thing I didn't know I needed until I had it," says Tia, their engineering lead. "Now when a PR migrates the schema, I can just click into the preview, run the migration, verify it works, and approve — without touching prod."