Jake Gold
Infra eng leader, SF Bay Area. Helped launch and scale Bluesky. Prev: Nuro, Docker, Google, and founder.
Obsessed with history, computers, and open systems.
Happy to chat: j@jacob.gold
- It's 2026, so I now say "If you believe that, I've got a datacenter in space to sell you."
- It's counterintuitive, but Bluesky could be bigger than X/Threads in ~18 months of a change that fixes retention. The non-replicable act of bootstrapping the network already succeeded! Now we're just a product change away (e.g. adding subcommunities, modal video/image feeds) of exponential growth.
- Attempt #3 of moving to @zed.dev is dead. Zed seems great but key bindings don't work correctly in vim mode and I ran out of patience after 15m of trying to fix them. There will be an attempt #4. I can't go on living with these sluggish Electron webapp code editors after using vim for 20 years.
- Yeah, I know that Claude. Let me have my fantasies. I'm definitely not asking Claude if Santa Clause is real.
- Working at Docker, Inc while it imploded was the most horrifying experience I've had working at a tech startup. I should have quit *the day* the Successful Sales Guy Board Member took over as CEO and ended every all-hands with "So here's the new direction. If you don't like it, there's the door!"
- This is Claude's super intelligence canary bug. If it gets fixed that means the machine wars have begun.
- This blog post is a cautionary tale of the disaster that is trying to scale PostgreSQL beyond its limits. I firmly expect to have someone cite it to me as an example of how PostgreSQL scales extremely well.
- p̶r̶i̶v̶a̶t̶e̶ permissioned parts
- All that matters for Bluesky’s growth is retention. Which is a measure of how engaging the app is. If most users keep coming back on a daily basis then Bluesky will go straight to the moon. If retention is still broken then usage will dwindle. Good news is that retention can be fixed any point.
- Alright, it's been long enough to know that I don't regret using github.com/ent/ent I've used it for half dozen very high traffic production services and it's been absolutely great. I have done some fancy stuff with its codegen templates once but mostly just use it out of the box on new projects.
