Jake Gold, Infrastructure Engineer at Bluesky, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his experience helping to build Bluesky and why he’s so excited about it. Jake and Corey discuss the major differences when building a truly open-source social media platform, and Jake highlights his focus on reliability. Jake explains why he feels downtime can actually be a huge benefit to reliability engineers, and why how he views abstractions based on the size of the team he’s working on. Corey and Jake also discuss whether cloud is truly living up to its original promise of lowered costs. About JakeJake Gold leads infrastructure at Bluesky, where the team is developing and deploying the decentralized social media protocol, ATP. Jake has previously managed infrastructure at companies such as Docker and Flipboard, and most recently, he was the founding leader of the Robot Reliability Team at Nuro, an autonomous delivery vehicle company.Links Referenced:
Bluesky: https://blueskyweb.xyz/

Bluesky waitlist signup: https://bsky.app

TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. In case folks have missed this, I spent an inordinate amount of time on Twitter over the last decade or so, to the point where my wife, my business partner, and a couple of friends all went in over the holidays and got me a leather-bound set of books titled The Collected Works of Corey Quinn. It turns out that I have over a million words of shitpost on Twitter. If you’ve also been living in a cave for the last year, you’ll notice that Twitter has basically been bought and driven into the ground by the world’s saddest manchild, so there’s been a bit of a diaspora as far as people trying to figure out where community lives.Jake Gold is an infrastructure engineer at Bluesky—which I will continue to be mispronouncing as Blue-ski because that’s the kind of person I am—which is, as best I can tell, one of the leading contenders, if not the leading contender to replace what Twitter was for me. Jake, welcome to the show.Jake: Thanks a lot, Corey. Glad to be here.Corey: So, there’s a lot of different angles we can take on this. We can talk about the policy side of it, we can talk about social networks and things we learn watching people in large groups with quasi-anonymity, we can talk about all kinds of different nonsense. But I don’t want to do that because I am an old-school Linux systems administrator. And I believe you came from the exact same path, given that as we were making sure that I had, you know, the right person on the show, you came into work at a company after I’d left previously. So, not only are you good at the whole Linux server thing; you also have seen exactly how good I am not at the Linux server thing.Jake: Well, I don’t remember there being any problems at TrueCar, where you worked before me. But yeah, my background is doing Linux systems administration, which turned into, sort of, Linux programming. And these days, we call it, you know, site reliability engineering. But yeah, I discovered Linux in the late-90s, as a teenager and, you know, installing Slackware on 50 floppy disks and things like that. And I just fell in love with the magic of, like, being able to run a web server, you know? I got a hosting account at, you know, my local ISP, and I was like, how do they do that, right?And then I figured out how to do it. I ran Apache, and it was like, still one of my core memories of getting, you know, httpd running and being able to access it over the internet and telling my friends on IRC. And so, I’ve done a whole bunch of things since then, but that