Bluesky has been on a roller coaster of growth for over a year. From the early days of figuring out a new distributed social protocol—AT protocol—to actually building it and inviting 30 million of their closest friends. Not only has the site gone through tremendous growth, the team has been optimizing, re-architecting, and adding features the entire time.

Jaz is a software engineer focused on the infrastructure at Bluesky, and they share how they achieved exponential growth without exponential costs. We cover some of the key components of the protocol and how that affects the architecture.

There’s some amazing advice from the trenches we know you’ll enjoy.

Show Highlights
(0:00 ) Intro
(5:00 ) Jaz’s background
(12:30 ) Bluesky Infrastructure
(17:00 ) Predicting the future
(20:00 ) What is a PDS?
(22:30 ) Relay and firehose
(26:00 ) Work queues
(30:00 ) Scaling physical servers
(37:00 ) How do you handle incidents?
(41:00 ) Where’s Kubernetes?
(43:30 ) How video changes
(45:00 ) Data locality
(46:30 ) Hardware decisions
(53:00 ) What bad decisions?
(57:00 ) Launching video
(1:00:00 ) What’s next?

About Jaz

Jaz is a software engineer who learned from on-the-job experience. They have a background with hardware which makes them better with software. If they’re not drinking Monster they’re building a single purpose database, or maybe they’re doing both. Jaz went from building with AT protocol to building AT protocol in a matter of months. They also have an impressive collection of plushies and power tools.

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