Hey there! I'm alive again. It's good to not be hacking my lungs up and exacerbating my asthma.
I felt well enough over the last week to dive into Trinkets, finally, so that's all I have to talk about this week.
Trinkets!
At the start of the year, I said that my goal was to have Trinkets ready and usable by ATmosphereConf. January is over now--that means that the conference is about 2 months away! Y'know, if there was a good time to get started, it was now.
As a reminder, Trinkets is my vision for a 3D model sharing website on atproto. Since the PDS gives us blob storage for free, it doesn't seem all that complicated; just list folks' models and provide a viewer for looking at them in the browser.
So, good news: Trinkets is working! I have successfully stored a 3MF file in my PDS, and I have a working AppView that puts a model viewer front-and-center. It technically supports a whole swathe of model formats (gLB, gLTF, OBJ, STL, FBX) but I haven't tested them out yet since 3MF was my most desired format.
It's not hosted anywhere yet, but when it is, it'll be available at https://trinkets.network. I figured I'd yap for a sec about what's stopping me, in hopes that I'll just... get over 'em, live on air. So, here they are:
I'm not sure I want Trinkets to be open-source
Well... It's working already. I actually am sure that I want Trinkets to be open-source, but my trepidation is actually around accepting contributions.
In the process of writing a few sentences, I've gone from "I want to work on this by myself with nobody looking at it" to "I guess I can technically publish the source, and taking contributions would probably be good for me." So, onto Tangled this shall go. I'll take contributions as I can handle them.
I'm not settled on the lexicons
At the moment, Trinkets isn't doing anything new in the model-sharing space. Every other platform allows you to upload models, view them in a canvas, and share them around.
However, I have bigger aspirations for Trinkets as a Tangled-like space for CAD-ers and modelers. I want it to have the usual social features (bookmarks, likes, remixing), but I also want to build it into a revision-tracking space.
So often do I end up with 10 slightly-different revisions of a particular project, adjusting for printing tolerances, incorrect measurements, and other considerations. My dream is to be able to plot out a graph of revisions in a project, complete with descriptions as to why each model revision exists. I haven't found any existing tools to help me with this, so I plan to build it myself.
There's no way I'm building all of that up-front, but I need to consider that direction while I build out the lexicons. And so far, I don't feel like the forward path is clear enough. I'm using a network.trinkets.v0.* versioning scheme in the lexicon ID, but it feels... brittle. Idk, I need to take a little more time to process my feelings about my schemas before I let them proliferate the Atmosphere.
It needs more human touch
Part of how I got Trinkets working so quickly is due to using a Letta agent to help build it out. I scaffolded the project, and then the agent helped me get the critical features in place.
I've been very careful to review all of the code that my agent has written, but I can't shake the feeling that I need to take another pass. I think that will be the case until I've pored over every function and refactored it into my personal style.
The unfortunate dilemma with this is that I have to avoid the temptation to ask the agent to write a new feature, which will just pile on more code to review. It's not exactly a winning fight with the chemicals in my brain--they want more features, and they want them now!
Most important of all, I want the AppView to feel human-crafted. It needs a visual style that I contribute, but I haven't spent enough time bringing that to life. I've coded Google Balls into the application, completely unassisted--so I'm pretty proud of that--but there's still room for color, typography, layout refinements, and more goofy three.js vignettes.
Until I've spent time on all those details, I'm not sure that I'll shake the feeling that I'm distributing slop. I want to feel like I'm contributing more of my vision for Trinkets than my agent is--which doesn't have a vision at all.
Perhaps this isn't a battle that I can win, and the only answer will be going cold-turkey on my agent. I don't know right now, but hopefully I'll be able to find answers and come to terms with them by the end of February.
Alright, that's enough journaling for now. Let me know if you're as excited as I am to have Trinkets online. Thanks for reading, and have a great week!