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Lawrence Jones

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Deploying to production in <5m with our hosted container builder

November 18, 2021

Fast build times have a number of benefits, from reliability to developer happiness. We reduces our time to deploy to <5, and it's glorious.

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Logs and tracing: not just for production, local development too

November 11, 2021

For a small initial investment, we've found a observability setup that works great for both production and local development. You should try it, too!

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How to avoid bad assumptions during incidents

September 24, 2021

Any good investigation builds on assumptions, and when they're wrong you can end up down a dark path. Read about an incident where this happened badly, and learn some strategies to avoid falling into the same trap.

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Moving on from GoCardless

August 1, 2021

Starting next week, I'll be joining the incident.io team after logging off for the last time at GoCardless. Mostly for myself, here's some reflections on the last five years.

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On working too hard: finding balance, and lessons learned from others

July 4, 2021

Working hard is a great way to accelerate learning, but it can come at a cost. This post shares my experience and lessons taken from great role models I've found along the way.

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Embed a Javascript website inside a binary with Go 1.16

February 16, 2021

The upcoming Golang embed directive can help distribute applications that depend on non-Go code assets. See how you can embed an entire Javascript website into your Go program, simplifying distribution to single binary.

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Deploying software at GoCardless: our Getting-Started tutorial

January 12, 2021

Building a modern infrastructure stack is difficult, with a bewildering number of choices to be made. Some technologies complement each other, while others have very different philosophies: it’s easy to get lost.

To help those facing similar challenges, we’re open-sourcing our “Getting Started” tutorial, which is what we ask all GoCardless developers to follow during their onboarding.

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How we compress Pub/Sub messages and more, saving a load of money

December 29, 2020

Compression is a trick that can be used to solve a load of problems. Outside of well known use cases, there are a variety of opportunities to improve efficiency or save money by leveraging compression.

This post covers one such opportunity, where a tiny change allowed us to save >$30k per year in infrastructure cost, along with a few other big-savers from judicious application of compression.

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Connected data: Using BigQuery to analyse user behaviour in response to webhooks

November 8, 2020

Your company probably has a lot of data. When you expose all of these different sources under a tool that makes complex analysis as fast as thought, you'll create a load of opportunities to make data-driven decisions.

By sharing an example where 2hrs of analysis helped prioritse 2-4 weeks of engineering work, I'm going to try convincing you that the value of a connected dataset is far more than the sum of its parts.

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An incident response starter-pack: how do you handle production outages?

October 27, 2020

Tips-and-tricks to better handle incidents, learned over years of dealing with production issues. Included are opinions on strategy, process, tools and how to handle the all-important human element.

Read this if you're new to incident response and want a starter-pack of advice, or to contrast your own perspective with another.

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