Bridging feels seamless. Behind the scenes, it's a technical marvel

Link: Bridging on a budget, by Ryan Barrett at A New SocialI’ve been in awe of Ryan Barrett since I first met him over a decade ago. He cofounded Google App Engine and led engineering at Color Health. His Bridgy tool, which allows people on different protocols and networks to follow and converse with each other, is now the basis of A New Social, the open social web non-profit that he runs with Anuj Ahooja. (Disclosure: I’m on the board.)This post about how he reduced Bridgy costs is brilliantly detailed. It’s a good look into what’s involved when you need to refactor and reduce cost at scale — and what’s remarkable is how effective this work actually was.“The end result of all of this is that we grew from 2k users to almost 150k, added a ton of heavy new functionality, and still managed to optimize and cut down costs from $.15 per active user per month to just $.03 or so.”But it didn’t come easily. When you’re connected to the kinds of firehoses that Bridgy needs to be, and serving…