Top all-time · #5136
Lawrence Jones
Personal blog · blog.lawrencejones.devprogrammingsystems
Lawrence Jones's personal blog at blog.lawrencejones.dev covers programming and systems. Since 2019, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 50 times, most often “Why you need a service registry”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN links this blog for its post on alternatives to UUIDv4, including ULIDs and their performance when generated in SQL and inserted into database indexes.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Founding Engineer at incident.io, where I lead AI SRE. Writing about Postgres, Go, incidents, start-ups and AI.
Most-linked posts?
- Why you need a service registry3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-09-28
- You don't need Python to build AI products3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-02-16
- Use your database to power state machines2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-09-16
- We compress Pub/Sub messages and more, saving a load of money2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-12-29
- Uptime, status pages, and transparency calculus2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-01-30
What Hacker News says?
Fwiw I've spent my whole career doing data analysis but the ease at which I was able to use OpenAI to help me for this post (am author) blew me away. The fact that I can do this type of analysis is why I appreciate it so much. It's one of the reasons I'm convinced AI engineering find its way into the average software engineer's remit ( https://blog.lawrencejones.dev/2023/#ai ) because it makes this analysis far more…
Comment linking /2023/
on “Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading”Submitted Want to found a startup? Work at one first as a story · 318 points
HN discussionWell this is funny: I'm the author of this post, and pleasantly surprised to see it coming around for a second time! If you like this content, there's a bunch more on my blog that you'll probably like too: https://blog.lawrencejones.dev/ While I continue to work with Postgres, I'm enjoying the life of an early start-up where your default is "not much data", though it does make you unlearn a lot of the habits develop…
Comment linking /
on “Debugging the Postgres query planner (2018)”Submitted On working too hard: finding balance, and lessons learned from others as a story · 174 points
HN discussionAuthor here! These 10B log lines are from the last 60 days of activity from https://gocardless.com/ systems. It includes: - System logs, such as our Kubernetes VM host logs, or our Chef Postgres machines - Application logs from Kubernetes pods - HTTP and RPC logs - Audit logs from Stackdriver (we use GCP for all our infrastructure) > do you ever do anything with them that requires you to store so much data rather th…
Comment linking /connected-data/
on “We compress Pub/Sub messages and more, saving a load of money”Submitted Building a PostgreSQL load tester as a story · 95 points
HN discussionI don't think that's right. They show in the section titled "Generating" that the performance of calling the ULID function from SQL is only very slightly slower. It's the INSERT that performs worse. Generally, inserting sorted values (like sequential integers or in this case, ULIDs) into a B-tree index is much faster than inserting random values. This is because inserted values go into the same, highly packed B-tree…
Comment linking /ulid
on “Exploring Alternatives to UUIDv4; Enter ULIDs”Submitted We compress Pub/Sub messages and more, saving a load of money as a story · 46 points
HN discussionGlad you enjoyed the article! The experience I reference was from my time at GoCardless, where I was a Principal SRE leading the team who were on-call for the big Rails monolith. I’ll put the topic of “what does 10x eng team scaling feel like” on my todo list for posts, but if you’re interested there’s a bunch of articles on my personal blog from this time. One that might be interesting is “Growing into Platform Eng…
Comment linking /growing-into-platform-engineering/
on “Keep the Monolith, but Split the Workloads”Submitted Hacking sum types with Go generics as a story · 34 points
HN discussionMine is https://blog.lawrencejones.dev/ I’ve been working as a software engineer for about a decade now, primarily at startups. Recently the first employee at incident.io, before then working at GoCardless. Tend to write about lessons I’ve learned that others find useful, or stories I think will be enjoyable. Helps me collect my thoughts and practice my writing! Examples would be; - Want to found a start-up? Work at…
Comment linking /working-too-hard/
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Fixing flaky dbt tests with a sync cutoff as a story · 12 points
HN discussionWrote about my experience using ulids in Postgres if people are considering it: https://blog.lawrencejones.dev/ulid/
Comment linking /ulid/
on “Choosing a Postgres Primary Key”Submitted Why you need a service registry as a story · 12 points
HN discussionFunny this keeps coming up! I wrote about my experience using ulids the other day, specifically with Postgres and some of the dis/advantages you get with it. It's a deeper dive into ulids than this article is, and shows some real world issues that crop up: https://blog.lawrencejones.dev/ulid/ That said, and spoiler alert: I'd probably go with bigint-sequence backed text IDs if I were choosing this over again.
Comment linking /ulid/
on “Choosing a Postgres Primary Key”Submitted We compress Pub/Sub messages and more, saving a load of money as a story · 9 points
HN discussionSubmitted The AI Innovator's Dilemma as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Learn One Thing at a Time as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted What developers find surprising about Postgres transactions as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted An incident response starter-pack: how do you handle production outages? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Avoid time-of-measurement bias with Prometheus as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why change role to AI Engineering as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Design driven API development with type-safety across the stack as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Connected data: Using BigQuery to analyse user behaviour in response to webhooks as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Uptime, status pages, and transparency calculus as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Trade-offs from using ULIDs at incident.io as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fixing flaky dbt tests with a sync cutoff as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted You Need a Service Registry as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Building a PostgreSQL Load Tester as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Use your database to power state machines (2023) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
