Lawrence Jones
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lawrencejones.dev
Lawrence Jones
@lawrencejones.dev
Engineer at https://incident.io/. Previously @GoCardless | Writes at http://blog.lawrencejones.dev | @lawrjones on Twitter
Was fun changing our Old Street billboard to focus on eng hiring last Friday.

Went a few rounds with the team and felt this represented us well!
May 12, 2025 at 6:11 PM
One nice touch is the “Note from the team” with all our faces on the signature.

I think it really captures how the team feels, from our ‘win together’ mindset to the pride we take in our work.

I’ve attached a copy with a big “WE’RE HIRING” message because…
March 26, 2025 at 7:18 PM
Sigh
February 28, 2025 at 9:45 AM
How is this a thing
February 22, 2025 at 2:25 PM
Was playing with some CI build time improvements yesterday and booting big old machines is something I will always enjoy.

96 cores go brrrrrr
February 13, 2025 at 10:35 AM
Gotten into the habit of getting AI to check my code piece-by-piece as I build systems.

Doesn't replace a human or a review, but it frequently catches issues I'd otherwise miss or only find once I'd deployed.

Can't recommend this enough!
January 27, 2025 at 7:36 PM
This was a fun chat about how we're building an AI incident responder, which:

- Checks your Grafana dashboards
- Looks at recent PRs
- Finds past incidents like this one

And drops a message just like this one I got this morning when I broke our evals 😂
January 23, 2025 at 4:44 PM
Yeah, get real comfortable with pass rates and what that means for your CI!
January 19, 2025 at 9:33 PM
We've got a new game at work "Cold Case Mysteries" where people submit a picture of their fridge and then we all guess who it is.

I thought this would be funny but did not anticipate a character assassination.
January 16, 2025 at 5:18 PM
Keep making eye contact with this weirdo across my desk and it’s kinda freaking me out
January 10, 2025 at 9:42 AM
Yeah maybe I need to switch my terminology!

Will see how I feel after reading this.
January 8, 2025 at 8:16 PM
This is a really good idea and is, as you say, really easy.

Less easy to do on device but genuinely would do an amazing amount of good to flag this stuff for people who otherwise wouldn’t know.
January 5, 2025 at 9:47 PM
Guys this whole 12 day thing is a terrible idea, this tree was emotionally load bearing 😭
January 5, 2025 at 3:54 PM
I pushed all my git history into Gemini earlier, everything for the last year, then asked it to categorise PRs against themes.

Eventually I got a graph of what I've been working on and when across the year.

I've wanted to do this for years, cool how easy it is now.
December 31, 2024 at 4:38 PM
Urgh yeah, that sounds like bad prompts. Is it weird that I find it difficult to imagine Apple screwing up like that?

Reminding me of just the other week 😂
December 31, 2024 at 8:46 AM
This is genuinely an incredible process that's reducing time-to-fix config errors to ~30s, but the personal insults keep coming 😂

Almost everything is "ah yes! this is totally archaic!"
December 28, 2024 at 10:35 PM
I've maintained a vimrc for about 13 years. A better engineer would have removed things in that time, but I did not.

Since then s/Vim/Neovim/, and s/vimscript/Lua/, which had put me off a full rebuild.

Turns out for the price of a light hazing, Claude can upgrade the whole settings file for me!
December 28, 2024 at 9:47 PM
Alright that went great!

1. Rest for 5m
2. Hot skillet for 45s each side with butter and garlic
3. Rest for 5m more

Quite fun getting to play with both the meater and my Fujifilm at the same time, ngl.

Being home alone is not good for me.
December 27, 2024 at 8:19 PM
Pretty cool, you get all the temperatures live to your phone with an eta on cooking time.

Nice touch to have the Dynamic Island working too.
December 27, 2024 at 7:35 PM
Game plan is reverse sear in oven until 51/52 degrees (Celsius) then rest for 5m before cast iron skillet to finish with butter and garlic.

God speed Bessie 🫡
December 27, 2024 at 7:33 PM
Got a cool new meat thermometer that’s fully Bluetooth for Christmas so decided to try it out today.

M&S only had a thin rib eye so it’s quite overkill but here we go!
December 27, 2024 at 7:32 PM
Consoling myself that while the key ring may be gone, I fully intend to be buried with this GoCardless bottle opener.
December 27, 2024 at 3:57 PM
Been looking forward to this for months, got a back catalogue of papers waiting for it to arrive!

Really hoping it meets expectations🤞
December 27, 2024 at 12:16 PM
My family dog stands here for extended periods of time slow cooking herself, refusing to move away.

I expect having a fire each night is her favourite part of Christmas.
December 26, 2024 at 8:21 PM
This is savage and I appreciate the creativity that went into this, even if it makes me cry a bit
December 25, 2024 at 7:12 PM