I've moved my weekly journals off of my main blog and on to this new one, to try and keep that place neat. I'll leave the old ones where they are at the moment, since Leaflet doesn't appear to have a way to move posts between publications.
Fall is in full swing out in the PNW. Leaves are everywhere, it's rainy and grey—I couldn't ask for much more, except maybe for my house to hold it together through another winter.
I'm a subscriber to labelling Monday as the start of the week, but for this week? I'm gonna give that title to Wednesday.
My First Dev Meetup
On Wednesday, I journeyed up to Seattle to attend the <ReactNative.Meetup>. I've been to meetups in the past—gamedev, keyboards, and entrepreneurship-focused ones—but this was my first time at a meetup by developers, for developers.
Originally, I planned to attend a Letta meetup during that time, but that fell through due to scheduling. It just so happened there was a second meetup at the same time, so my train ticket wouldn't go to waste.
I made a conscious effort to stay open-minded and to not hold any expectations for interactions that may occur. Perhaps that sounds normal to others, but I realized it was a reflex I was conditioned to. Especially at meetups where I have no connections, this behavior would manifest in tremendous social anxiety, and I would spend the entire event deflecting people and wishing to leave.
This meetup was a landmark for me. I think I've made a lot of progress on my social anxiety in the last couple years, thanks to time spent considering spirituality, and my patient friends and family whom I am forever thankful for.
Overall, I had a great time. I met some interesting folks and had some great conversations. A special shoutout to Caidan for welcoming me into the INTDEV studio early, showing me around, and introducing me to the folks working there. I received some great advice from Jimmy, which I've heard in similar forms before, but it was much more meaningful to me now than it was 6 years ago in university.
I wish I could have stayed for the final talk, but Flix cancelled my late-night bus and I had to catch the final train. I'll definitely try to make it to subsequent events, especially as I start to look into using React Native for my next few projects. Meeting new people is now something I look forward to!
Cistern
The other benefit of this meetup? I needed to kill about 7 hours on the train. I thought I would spend that time playing Pokemon Legends: Z-A, but instead I managed to program for the entire trip.
It was just me, my editor, and the Deno LSP. There was only enough wi-fi to grab a package every time the train rolled into the next station. Without even the possibility of using Claude, it was practically a zen experience. I enjoyed it immensely.
As a result, I have made some substantial progress on the atproto-ification of Cistern, my quick-capture app. The first attempt at an SDK is now completely written out—I intend to write an end-to-end test before moving on to writing apps.
The SDK is split into producer and consumer modules, the former for encrypting items and the latter for creating keys and decrypting items. I'll start with a dead-simple React Native app implementing the producer, then I would like to write an MCP server and an Obsidian plugin to act as consumers.
After Cistern...?
Thingiverse for atproto would be really nice. Add a record type that links to a blob of the stl, a viewer, and can use constellation 🌌to list them all for an easier viewer, and no backend needed at the start #atprotoidea
I'm not going to spend a lot of time building Cistern apps, because while I find the service useful, I see it more as a learning exercise. Instead, I would really like to move on to building out 3D model sharing on Atproto.
I CAD a lot, for small things I print and then use around the home. I have yet to find a service that I enjoy using for storing my resulting .3mf files because I care about retaining ownership over them. I would also love to have a great way to view and share those models, and I don't find that existing services like Thingiverse cut it. Versioning would also be a plus, because Shapr3D doesn't particularly help with that.
Thangs is nice, but I've found the interface thoroughly overwhelming these days. So, Thingiverse on Atproto? Seems like a perfect match to me. With Cistern under my belt, I'm confident in my ability to build something bigger.
It's funny how in college, "building a social network" was treated as a meme and a cautionary tale. Now, I'm chomping at the bit to do it—I suspect I was just closeted at the time. Oh how times change.
Thanks again for reading. I hope you have a wonderful week!