Co-founder and CTO at
@incident_io
— incident management so good, you'll break things on purpose 🔥🚒
Prev.
@monzo
,
@gocardless
. Probably in the shed 🛠
We’ve just launched
@incident_io
On-call and I couldn’t be more excited! 🎉
Our goal was “so good, you’ll break things on purpose” and we’ve poured our hearts and souls into this one.
I think it shows ❤️
Today, I finally did it. Peak dad.
Took a mini WD40 to the playground to tackle the squeaky swings that have bothered me for months. Satisfaction off the scale. Permanent addition to the bottom of the buggy going forward.
My purpose in life is found.
So, erm, I guess this resonated… 🔧 🤝
Nothing to promote. Just a tired dad, trying to help the world run a little more smoothly* 😌
To all those working tirelessly to remove squeaky mechanisms from the world, I salute you 🫡
*and to those pointing out WD40 is not in fact a
This is a real life honest to god password prompt for our company internet banking account with
@jpmorgan
.
I really wasn't ready for an IQ test today. JFC.
Our new
@incident_io
office apparently has a door that just leads out of the side of the building, two stories up.
Surely we're not grown up enough for this to be allowed without some kind of adult supervision.
It's been a crazy experience founding
@incident_io
but raising $34m and opening our first US office was definitely a "pinch yourself" moment! 🎉
So excited for what this new chapter means for the team, our customers and our product. Let's go 🚀💪
Excited to say that as of this week, I'm working full time on
@incident_io
!
Sunshine: Out ☀️
Office: Leased 🏢
Headphones: On 🎧
New Desk Plant: Comically tiny 🪴🤦♂️😂
Let’s do this! 🚀
Week 1 at
@monzo
, done! 🎉
- Everyone is *so nice*, folks really go out of their way to make you feel welcome here ❤️
- The onboarding is slick as hell 🏎
- The level of transparency and openness is staggering 🔎
- I’ve never seen so many emojis in my life 😂
Bring on week 2 🚀
Whatever you do, don’t track number of PRs, or frequency of deploys to production!
Otherwise your team might optimise for quickly shipping tonnes of smaller, less risky, easier to review changes to game the numbers, and that’d mean… well… erm… hang on a minute 🤨🤔
We’re building a mobile app
@incident_io
and it’s looking 🔥. Using
@expo
and
@reactnative
- they’ve evolved so much 🤯.
Looking for amazing mobile contractors (London/Remote) with a really keen eye for delight / design to help out. If interested, DMs open! 🙏
I worked in fintech for ~8 years and saw some v. hairy banking incidents, but this one from
@Rippling
beats them all, I think.
Only 3.5 hours to arrange funds, prep and submit accurate bank files to a new bank and ensure 50k people got paid 🤯 👏
Look what arrived in the post today 😂
Thanks
@OriginalWD40_UK
, this made my day. Will continue to fight the good fight 🫡 🔧
Feel like I need a bandolier now though…
Today, I finally did it. Peak dad.
Took a mini WD40 to the playground to tackle the squeaky swings that have bothered me for months. Satisfaction off the scale. Permanent addition to the bottom of the buggy going forward.
My purpose in life is found.
After an amazing journey with
@GoCardless
over the past 6 years, I’ve decided it’s time for a new adventure.
Immensely proud of the team, culture and product we’ve built together. I’ve learned *tonnes* and it's a really special place, full of kind, smart, passionate people 😊❤️
Fun fact - all our new hires receive a
@pleo
card they can use to buy whatever would make them more effective at their job, with a yearly limit. We don't review expenses until they hit it.
Saves time, builds trust. Hire great people and get out of their way! 🙏🤝
This. A million times this. We ordered M1 Pros for the whole
@incident_io
engineering team immediately.
When it comes to the tools your team use every day, most investments are a no-brainer. Laptops, monitors, headphones, software, remote setup. Just do it.
As an engineer if there’s something in your product that you could materially fix or improve in under an hour, but “process” prevents you “just doing it”, do it anyway, or move company 🤷♂️
Unlikely to regret either option.
We welcomed two new hires this week, both referrals, both exceptional, so we're doubling down.
Refer someone amazing to
@incident_io
who we hire, and we'll pay you £10,000 once they pass probation.
Yes, that's a lot. We think it's totally worth it 🚀
When I got an email notification about a Major incident earlier at
@incident_io
, someone stuck in a meeting room is ... not what I was expecting 😂
You'll be pleased to hear the on-call engineer got paged, rolled their sleeves up and Lucy has since been freed 🏃♀️🎉
6 years ago we captured a young
@timrogers
and put him to work on the phones
@GoCardless
. Eventually he made the switch to engineering and today he leaves to run a technical team of his own at
@AviosUK
- good luck Tim! 💙🎉👏
One tradition I love here at
@incident_io
is that we print posters and get project teams to sign them for bigger releases, then hang them on the wall in our London HQ.
Our On-call launch last week was no exception - so proud of this team! ❤️
At
@incident_io
every employee gets a
@pleo
card to spend on whatever they need at work, with a £1k limit.
The prize for hitting the limit first goes to
@type_error
, who (as part of organising our next team dinner) has managed to blow it all on Cheese 🧀😂. A worthy winner.
I’m much better at building stuff than I am at tweeting about it, but...
Really excited to share something
@sjwhitworth
and I have been working on to help engineering teams create, manage and learn from their incidents better 🔥🚒🎓🚀
Check it out:
Startup life is full of ups and downs. Like Stripe telling you about your first churned customer 😱, which then turns out to have just been you, testing 😅😂.
Those British Pounds *were* incredibly valuable, though.
We just went from a customer question in Slack, to a scoped feature, to production, in 29 minutes flat ⚡️
So many things have to be true in a team for this to happen — support channels, autonomy, deployment processes and safeguards.
I never want to lose this.
Joined our
@incident_io
hackathon yesterday and attempted to visualise incidents happening on our platform around the world, along with their participants — pretty cool! 🌎🚨🔥
I normally tweet about engineering, leadership and incidents, but I think this might actually be my most popular tweet ever, and it’s about internet banking passwords 😂
Just got paged for
@incident_io
mid-hike. Edited code in
@github
on my phone w/ automated build, CI, deployment.
Bug fixed, on with the hike.
Technology is awesome.
Our new status pages are beautiful, but also really interesting under the hood! 🏗️
We just wrote up how we built it all on
@vercel
(❤️) &
@nextjs
. Covers ISR, caching and latency concerns, performance, timezones w/ SSR, live reloading and more 🤓✨.
Delighted to share that we've raised a seed round from
@IndexVentures
,
@PointNineCap
and some fantastic angel investors to accelerate our growth at
@incident_io
🎉🔥🚀
The next few years is going to be incredibly exciting — can't wait!
Taking a few weeks off to help my wife recover from surgery atm & today was my first check-in morning since I left.
My god, the amount the
@incident_io
team can get done in a week right now is mindblowing. Main focus when I'm back is hiring more of us and I can't wait. 🚀🚀🚀
One time, I plucked a random "big number" out of the air in an interview and casually asked a candidate how their system would perform with "40 billion users" 📈
This is, as
@evnsio
still enjoys telling people, over 5x the global population and I will never live it down 🤦♂️
@GoCardless
I'll be taking a bit of time out to read 📚, relax 🧘♂️, decompress 🎮 and finally finish some shed projects 🛠.
As for what comes next, I'm super excited to share that...
I’m joining
@monzo
! 🎉🚀🏦🔜
🍍🎂 — "Pineapple" was a random choice because, and I quote, "it's so stupid it means we'll definitely have to change it". We also considered "Avocado" 🥑.
No regrets - all official and legal comms addressing us as "Pineapple Technology Ltd" brings me ongoing joy.
We recently shifted our infra to Google Cloud and hit some pretty thorny postgres + memcached timeouts 🐌
Team did a great technical writeup - grab a cuppa and follow us down the rabbit hole... ☕️ 📚
We often get asked "What is it like to work at
@incident_io
?" and I always wish I could capture some of the amazing responses from our team.
Well, now we have! 🎉
Here's what it feels like to work here (spoiler: it's pretty great) 👇❤️😊
Starting a company has hard moments, but also special ones.
Last week
@incident_io
travelled up to Edinburgh, put our laptops away and just hung out together as a team. We cooked, played board games, ate great food, talked about the future and sampled whisky by the fire🥃🔥❤️
👋 We're growing fast, and hiring our first People person at
@incident_io
HQ!
This is a *huge* opportunity to hire and shape an amazing team and culture, that we invest in as heavily as we do our product. Super excited about this one ❤
, DMs welcome!
I just spent about 3 hours repeatedly replying to new and existing customers to enable our new On-call product for them on launch day.
No advanced automation. Just emails, DMs and good vibes. Manual by design, and immeasurably satisfying.
As a founder, these are the days ❤️🚀
The SVB update yesterday meant lots of founders could breathe a sigh of relief, but for many of us, it also meant properly seeing our kids after several long days and late nights in the office. I recommend sound… 😂 ❤️
This. A million times this. We ordered M1 Pros for the whole
@incident_io
engineering team immediately.
When it comes to the tools your team use every day, most investments are a no-brainer. Laptops, monitors, headphones, software, remote setup. Just do it.
Best-in-class-hardware that results in faster developer experience is one of the most no-brainier investments any company can make in their software engineers who write & compile code day-in, day-out.
Shopify is not a standout example: those who don’t do this are poor examples.
We just deployed
@incident_io
for the 1,500th time this year! 🎉🚢
Mostly just founders up to now, but this month our first hires joined, and pace has already doubled.
Super exciting, and we're just getting started 🚀🛠
It's an exciting day at
@incident_io
- we're launching Status Pages! 🎉
The team have been hard at work building the product we've always wanted to exist here and I'm super impressed with the results 🚀🔥❤️
Turns out
@honeycombio
has been one of our most requested On-call alerting integrations since launch last week, so
@r0ryma
got up this morning and ... just built it!? 🤯
Honeycomb have super rich payloads, which makes it even easier to build alert rules around - have fun! ❤️
The irony of Netlify going down and taking our marketing website with it on the day we, an incident management company announce our fundraise is quite special, you have to laugh 😂.
On the plus side, we have a great tool for this... 🤷♂️
We're waving goodbye to
@incident_io
HQ
#1
today, and in an amusing moment of realisation, it appears the movers have efficiently packed away our WiFi router first...😂
I'm really going to miss this place - a lot of love went into it, but very excited about the future!
Apparently Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp, TikTok and Gmail are all having major outages on the same day we're launching our On-call product here
@incident_io
?
I promise this wasn't planned... 😬
Delighted to announce the latest innovation at
@incident_io
HQ, designed for those inevitable mid-incident snack-deficit scenarios. Thanks to the genius of
@paprikati_eng
, we're prepared for anything now 🔥😋😂
So,
@evansio
just discovered custom themes in Slack.
Unsure whether the resulting chaos is his fault for shamelessly baiting me, or mine for having the self control of a toddler and clicking the button 😂 🤦♂️
@0xferruccio
@gokulr
Strong agree. I think there are lots of senior folks sitting at home preaching remote work whilst overlooking that they can do so successfully precisely because they spent years honing their skills, especially non technical ones, in the office. For early career folks, in person
If you’re not building software on
@linear
, imagine all the things you’ve ever *really* wanted from your issue tracking tool, made intuitive, blazing fast and beautifully designed.
That’s Linear.
Seriously, use it. Your team will thank you 😍
This year, we’ve been focusing on making
@linear
for fast growing startups. We believe in streamlining workflows, and it matters even more as companies grow. We’ve added new features to help them do that.
Our newest release featuring Triage and Timeline:
Today, after many weeks in beta, today we’re launching 4 new AI-powered features to supercharge incident management — I couldn’t be more excited! 🚀🎉
As one beta customer put it — “the AI future is already here”.
✨ Explore and learn from every incident you’ve ever had with
I get lots of questions about our engineering interview process from applicants who want more info before applying, or some guidance on how best to prepare.
It's not a secret - here's how ours works, warts and all!
We've been lucky to work with some fantastic early customers at
@incident_io
— periodically updating the logos on our homepage is a great reminder. Long may it continue! ❤️
Firsts are awesome, and it’s been a week of them for
@incident_io
! 🥇
Monday - first paying customer
Friday - first customer just paid a year up front
Seeing early adopters with such high conviction in what we’re doing is so motivating 🚀😄
Of all the things happening at
@incident_io
right now (there’s a *lot*), the calibre of the team we’re building is definitely one of the most exciting. Welcome
@paprikati_eng
! 🎉
📣 Got some news: I'm starting at
@incident_io
on Monday. 🥳🥳🥳
Could not be more excited to join the amazing team - looking forward to building a great product and learning loads along the way!
🔥🔥🔥
We're releasing some really, really cool things at
@incident_io
over the next few weeks, that I've always wished existed — it's been amazing to watch the team bring them to life.
First one drops later today and I can't wait 👀🔜
I just experienced one of the most meta incidents I've ever been part of.
We shipped our practical guide to incident management (), which promptly crashed, resulting in an incident, which we ran on
@incident_io
, using our incident guide 😂
I’m not saying we have the best conference swag, but… 👀
Umbrellas don’t work everywhere, but when you live in the UK, rain is a regular incident, and we’re here for you ☔️ ❤️
I’m delighted to welcome
@shelikavoid
as our new VP Engineering here at
@incident_io
🎉
Norberto was our first ever customer during the first phase of the company when we were super tiny, so it feels rather fitting that he's now coming on board to help us as we grow 🚀
One of the (many) things I'm really proud of at
@incident_io
is how the team are honest when projects are off track and immediately swarm to regroup, course correct and keep momentum high. Comms clear throughout.
I also *love*
@linear
's project tracking feature ❤️
If, like me, you’re leaving
#LeadDevLondon
with a smidge of imposter syndrome from all the awesome talks, try and remember this image.
Keep learning. Keep growing.
You’ve got this.
We just shipped the ability to sync on-call schedules with Slack groups 🔥🤝
Set up a schedule and link it to a Slack group, then we'll do the rest. Need to get hold of the person on-call for a particular team? Just mention the group!
Keep the feedback coming ❤️
This is how it feels in the
@incident_io
product team right now 😅🚀
If you love getting shit done — building great products, speaking to customers and shipping at 100mph, I'm actively looking for senior engineers and designers who can accelerate us. We should chat. DMs open.
One of my favourite little things about building
@incident_io
is the randomly generated names for all the test incidents we inevitably create.
Sometimes they're rubbish, other mornings you're treated to a "Chocolate Elephant" or a "Cloud Alpaca" 🍫🐘☁️🦙
One thing about being a parent that constantly blows my mind is being reminded of just how many firsts children experience daily.
Today my wife sent me this pic and I suddenly realised, he's literally never seen a fish before in his life (he loves them) 🐟🤯❤️
We recently set up a
@vestaboard
in the office and I really love the analog feel, compared to just having a screen on the wall ❤️.
I've given the API keys to the team, let's see what happens from here — any ideas? 💡
We just hit PR
#10
,000 at
@incident_io
! 🎉
It's for a new (very exciting) feature so I won't share a screenshot but here's a fun graph instead 📈
Wild that it took us ~7 months to hit the first 1000 and only ~40 days for the last 🤯
We were featured on the
@SlackHQ
App Store yesterday 🎉
Was having a lovely day off for my Birthday, away from phones and laptops — what a nice present to come back to! 🎂🎁😄
We've been featured by the
@SlackHQ
App Store!
Thanks for featuring us as one of the must-have apps to install folks. Feels comfy being alongside our friends
@loom
as well!
Check it out:
For our On-call launch, we hand-packed and mailed out thank you gifts to design partners, including a unique memento signed by the team. Why?
1. We couldn't have done it without them
2. Little things like this matter a lot to us
Love celebrating our customers ❤️
Team: Can we get new M3 Macbooks?
Me: If you can prove you need them, sure...
@lawrjones
: promptly dives down rabbit hole 🐇🕳️
✅ Fancy new build telemetry
✅ Some genuinely cool AI data insights
✅ Engineers getting new laptops
This team, honestly 🤦♂️❤️
This IWD, I'm celebrating my incredible wife ❤️
🎵 Founded
@PeliMusicSchool
, giving 1000’s of young children access to a music education every year
👩🦽 Faced down major health problems along the way. Her resilience and grit is *insane*
❤️ The most incredible mum and teammate
Day before the conference and our branded T-shirts finally arrived, only for us to realise our supplier accidentally used blue ink instead of white 🤦♂️.
I hereby brand this “special edition
#LeadDevLondon
merch”. Get ‘em while they last 🔥😂
@steventey
The only thing better than the incident being declared is how much fun everyone is having taking it extremely seriously.
Good practice for incident comms at least 😂
Was so focussed on building the thing today that I almost forgot we were finally announcing this! Super proud of everyone on the team here
@GoCardless
💙🎉💸
Fun new feature —
@incident_io
now syncs incident debriefs and postmortem meetings directly with Google Calendar 📆 🤝 🔥
1️⃣ Know who actually attended
2️⃣ Record that it definitely happened (and when!)
3️⃣ Schedule the event directly in
@incident_io
Here's how it works 👇🧵
1/9
Stop configuring on-call shift overrides the hard way - just ask, and we'll sort it for you ✨.
A little bit of Friday magic for all our on-call customers, courtesy of
@rorybain
and
@samwill_is
🎁❤️
🔥 No doubt 11 Downing Street has had its fair share of incidents but for one night
@incident_io
was there to show Government how incidents can be managed painlessly and effectively.
Thanks for the merch!
One of the things I absolutely love about our team is that they don't just do great work, they openly write about it, too!
Here's some recent highlights 👇❤️