Blake Gentry
Member Of Technical Staff at River
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBlake Gentry is a product-focused engineer and founder with 15 years building scalable web and distributed systems from early-stage startups to larger platforms. He’s an early employee at Heroku and Opendoor and has led engineering and product initiatives—launching regions, re-architecting infrastructure for multi-region support, and shipping high-throughput services in Go. Blake has founded and open-sourced River (background jobs for Go + Postgres) and contributed to notable OSS projects like Heroku’s log router, the Fog cloud library, Flynn, and the lib/pq Postgres driver, often improving robustness around metrics, routing, and time/SSL parsing. Comfortable across backend, full-stack, and systems work, he blends product intuition with hands-on engineering, and has repeatedly translated customer needs into reliable, maintainable platforms. Based in Austin, he also brings uncommon breadth—from founding hardware-enabled SaaS to shipping large-scale streaming and webhook systems—making him adept at both startup grit and production-grade architecture.
15 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
B.S., Engineering Physics, B.S., Engineering Physics at University of the Pacific
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (27)
url-routing10
octokit10
reverse-proxy10
erlang10
postgresql10
data-collection10
apidoc10
ruby10
database-driver10
go10
api10
github-api10
collections10
error-handling10
logging10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
flynn/flynn
Jan 2015 - Mar 2015
[UNMAINTAINED] A next generation open source platform as a service (PaaS)
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:66 commits, 24 PRs, 89 pushes in 1 month
Contributions summary:Blake primarily focused on refactoring and enhancing the router component of the Flynn PaaS. Their contributions included renaming functions, moving TLS setup logic, and introducing features like X-Forwarded headers. They also converted core structs into HTTP Handlers to facilitate improved integration and control of the system. These changes suggest a focus on improving the system's architecture and functionality related to HTTP request handling and service routing.
paas
fog/fog
May 2011 - Apr 2014
The Ruby cloud services library.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:34 commits in 2 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Blake primarily contributed to the AWS-related features within the Fog Ruby cloud services library, focusing on the ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) service. Their work included bug fixes related to time calculations, API updates to version 2011-04-05, and adding new attributes from the updated API. The user also refactored and added functionality for handling listeners, including default values and SSLCertificateId parsing and validation. These changes improved the reliability and feature set of the library for AWS ELB users.
cloud-servicesruby
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