PinnedInEngineering @ LayersbyJake Casto·Aug 21, 2025Scaling Real‑Time Discovery: Inside Layers’ PlanetScale MigrationLayers is the only Search and Merchandising platform built exclusively for Shopify Plus. Our next-gen platform serves enterprise-level…
InEngineering @ LayersbyJake Casto·Oct 25Shipping 103,802 Dots in 82 KBHow we packed our hand plotted dot art into a very compact binary format, reduced geometry delivery by 93% and stopped rendering the…A response icon1A response icon1
InEngineering @ LayersbyJake Casto·Oct 5How PlanetScale TIN Became the Foundation for Layers SearchQuick note first. If you’ve been following TIN, you’ve seen the takes: it’s fast, “is it fast?”, dense-term elision is a mistake, etc. We…
InEngineering @ LayersbyJake Casto·Jul 31Three years, four rewrites, and a Roaring bitmapThe count next to that filter on a category page that you glance at for half a second before scrolling away is far harder to maintain than…
InEngineering @ LayersbyJake Casto·Jun 5Tearing Down Shopify’s Product Network Tracking ScriptI was debugging an issue on a customer store when I noticed a click/impression tracking script served from Shopify’s CDN that I’d never…
InEngineering @ LayersbyJake Casto·May 4Stop Making `/cart.js` CallsMost Shopify tracking scripts send additional cart requests to determine cart contents. Ours does not. This article explains our approach…
InEngineering @ LayersbyJake Casto·Apr 9How We Evaluate Search Quality at Scale With LLM Judging and IR MetricsHow Layers uses LLM judges, NDCG, A/B experiments, and query classification to measure ecommerce search quality at scale.
InEngineering @ LayersbyJake Casto·Mar 10The Hidden Failure Modes of Laravel + PgBouncer + PlanetScaleA production guide to connection pooling quirks, replica recovery conflicts, and lost connection detection for managed Postgres.
InEngineering @ LayersbyJake Casto·Mar 10We Built a Fake Shopify GraphQL Server. It Caught a Bug That Would Have Broken Production.How we built a fake Shopify GraphQL server that validates queries, enforces cost limits, and catches regressions before production.
InEngineering @ LayersbyJake Casto·Mar 6Using Multiple PgBouncers to Isolate Application and Worker ConnectionsOur database was healthy, but PgBouncer wasn’t. How a shared pool caused request timeouts and why we split workers and app pools.
