Lawrence Jones's posts

Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading

When our CTO said "I'll upgrade your MacBook if you can prove it's worthwhile" we embarked on a journey including (re)building a Go hot-reloader, instrumenting developer builds, analysing compiler performance and feeding an AI model the data until we had an answer.

Engineering nits: Building a Storybook for Slack Block Kit

We care a lot about the pace of shipping at incident.io, and we also build lots of UIs inside Slack. Slack previews lets us collaborate on designing these experiences much more quickly.

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.