Jake Casto
@0x15f
Founder @ Layers, a Search & Discovery Platform for Shopify Plus. Co-Founder @ Proton, a ghost agency taking the Shopify Plus ecosystem by storm ~ Ecomm Wizard
I’ll be honest. The toughest technical challenge Layers faced early on was… our search engine. Or rather, someone else’s. We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. So we partnered with fast growing open source search platform that showed promise. And for a while, it worked. But…
FUCK WE MOVED TO PLANETSCALE BUT DIDNT TURN OFF AUTO RENEW ON RDS RESERVATIONS... I HAVE TWO MASSIVE BOXES FOR ANOTHER YEAR THAT WERE PREPAID FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
I’ve spoken to dozens of brands while building @uselayers_. Most think of visual search as a nice-to-have. They’re not asking the real question: What happens when people do use it? This is what we’ve seen: Once someone taps into visual discovery, they don’t just use it once.…
Last month we were awarded Best of Built for @Shopify for 2025. Recognition for years of solving real merchant problems and our approach of always building where @ShopifyDevs is investing. 👉 Read about our experience at Editions abrapromotions.com/blogs/conversi…
So today I have to say this again: UUIDv7 primary keys are a valid choice. They eliminated the performance problems of random UUIDv4 values. And if you need to shard one day, you can easily move rows to other shards because you won‘t have clashing numerical ids.
So today I have to say this again: Do not use UUID for primary keys!
We keep features slim at @uselayers_. I’ll tell you why. I never wanted to build a dashboard that needs a manual. Or a feature list that reads like tax law. Layers isn’t about pages of toggles, it’s about building blocks. Think of it like Lego. You get clean, composable…
The latency between even two "nearby" regions like us-east 1 and 2 is ~18ms. us-east-1 to us-west-1 is closer to 60ms. This advice is spot on. Do yourself a favor and keep your database in the same region as your other infra. Better yet, same AZ!
please please please make sure your application servers are in the same region as your databases stop paying for extra latency
Who else is coming to Builder Wednesday next week at Shopify NYC? events.shopifyny.com/shopifybuilder
This is what he qualifies as hate.
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt: Half the world now hates us.
Resist oppression now and forever
It has arrived (two days ago, I missed it in the mail room)