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Skyler Hawthorne @dead10ck.dev · 05/01/2025

@jay.bsky.team any thoughts on Aaron Goldman's (self proclaimed architect of ATProto) story about being fired because of asking for parental leave?

Why I am not at Bluesky PBLLC.
Short version: I was fired by "Jay" Graber.
When my son was coming due, I asked to get parental leave. I also missed dwebcamp as it was at the same time as my sun was due. This set a precedent that I would put things like the birth of my first child over work. So, a week before the due date I was fired, Jay expressed regret that I was losing my health insurance immediately as I was about to have a child but that Bluesky was about to hire an additional employee and doing so would make them eligible for a number of California laws about parental leave. They had to fire me before the employee count hit 5 or it would be illegal for them to do so in response to my having a child. The concern was that with such a tiny workforce it was too hard to have a key engineer and protocol designer out on leave and then working around care for a newborn after that.
At the same time there were some technical disagreements and changes to the objectives. When I came on Twitter was planning to adopt the protocol and that meant designing integration with the existing twitter “take out my data” feature. I had extensive experience with the Twitter microservice architecture from my time on the Twitter security team. When Elon bought twitter and limited API access it was clear that there was no path to Twitter soon to be X ever working with Bluesky or AtProto in any way. So, my

The second technical change was that I was pushing for a three app initial launch of AtProto. The first was the Bluesky social network, the second was a calendar events app where the event creator put the events into a AtProto collection, and the third was a Dropbox-like file backup and sync app. Each app would force the protocol to remain somewhat generic. A repo checked out by an anonymous user would get only the public collections and a checkout by an authenticated author of the repo would also get the personal collections e.g. the file sync app. When Twitter exploded then Bluesky wanted to turn hard from a distributed publishing protocol to a single focus on the social network and becoming a competitor to Twitter faster than Twitter could be destroyed by Elon. Protocol work was suddenly much less important than traditional Application development.

They needed to build a Twitter clone immediately and could get back to the mission statement later once they had users. Jay kept telling us we are not building a Distributed database, we are making a social networking app. I kept telling her we are making a Distributed database and that “at://DID/APP/collection/path/to/object.ext” was a competitor to domain names, git, and the filesystem.

It was my opinion then as now that repositories that have URLs and are cryptographically authenticated so they can be mirrored without loss of authenticity is a bigger deal than a single social app. To me Authenticated-data Transfer PRTOocol(AtProto) was an important new kind of URL. She of course wanted to focus on bsky.app that either the app got good fast and captured the Twitter exodus or the PBLLC dies and there would be no funds to develop AtProto at all. We needed to be making money or no protocol would matter.
So I was fired, spent a few months off taking care of my newborn and then got a new job at a company that did see its mission as building a distributed database.
In the meantime, Jay hired more engineers that were focused on the social app and told the California unemployment office that I was fired for not posting to the company slack channels to the required degree. In the end I don’t recommend to any american losing your health insurance 2 hours after your child is born. While I am annoyed by Jay’s timing I still hope that AtProto has success. It is still nice to know that a protocol based on my PhD work is in use and still hope it have a future far greater then just bsky.app

AngryDutchman @angrydutchman.online · 05/01/2025

Wow, that's kind of a dick move.

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