Lawrence Jones's posts

Better security for your app's secrets

What comes after your default, out-of-box application secret solution? How do you add security to Heroku's environment variables, or go beyond putting secrets directly into Kubernetes? We've used GCP Secret Manager to improve our app secret handling, and this post shows how you can do the same.

Keep the monolith, but split the workloads

Everybody loves a monolith, but you can hit issues as you scale. This post is about a technique – splitting your workloads – that can significantly reduce that pain, costs little, and can be applied early.

Intermittent downtime from repeated crashes

This is a technical write-up of an incident on Friday 18th November 2022 where we experienced 13 minutes of downtime from intermittent crashes.

Building Workflows, Part 1 — Core concepts and the Workflow Builder

Part one of a deep-dive into building our workflow engine, covering core workflow concepts and how they are used to power the Workflow Builder.

Building Workflows, Part 2 – the executor and evaluation

Part two of the series lookin at the workflow executor, and concluding with an evaluation of the project in terms of developer time, extensibility, and quality of outcome.

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