Hey, it's been a while! Somewhere on the order of 4 months, in fact. I fell behind, then I started avoiding my notes, then... I just forgot about the habit. Whoops!
Quick—let me recap the last few months before I shirk my duties another week.
Travel
The main reason I've been skipping notes is because of some of the most fulfilling travel of my life—right up there next to ATmosphereConf '26 from earlier this year.
Wandering the East Coast
The first trip was a week-and-a-half whirlwind. Here's roughly what that trip looked like:
I flew to NYC to see friends and family, then attended the Community Day
I took the train up to New Haven to try the Duskbloods network test with a close friend
I took the train to Boston to hang out with the soon-to-be (now currently) newlyweds and
I flew to Chicago to meet up with Morgan, caught a meetup, spent a couple days doing tourist things, then saw BTS live at Soldier Field
Morgan and I already had the BTS part of that trip planned when the Community Day was announced, and they were so close together I thought I would be able to make something work.
I'm really pleased with the result. My trip was the perfect combination of solo travel, seeing new and old friends, and quality vacation time with my partner. Oh yeah, and I saw BTS.
Hong Kong
The other incredible trip I had was a week Hong Kong, to help Morgan and some friends run a coffee popup.
I'm half Cantonese. My mother immigrated from Hong Kong to Canada when she was very young, and she hasn't been back since—I'm the only one in my immediate family who has been there for decades.
We traveled both sides of the harbor and got to meet all sorts of locals. While Hong Kong is very different today from the city my mother knew, I felt like I got to put my heritage in context.
It was a powerful experience, and I can't wait until I can visit again.
Projects
dist.town
For those who didn't catch the meetup stream in August, I gave a talk about something I made for distributing software on ATProto called dist.town.
I managed to demonstrate that I could use it to distribute updates for its own CLI, but I didn't make much more progress on it after my talk.
Fast-forward past Hong Kong and an ensuing depressive episode, I got a message from @bnb.im and @trezy.codes. They asked if I was interested in helping them bring to life a set of lexicons for distributing software via ATProto. I leapt at the opportunity; After all, hadn't I already built such a thing?
After dusting off dist.town, I found that my existing work wasn't going to cut it. There were too many components resulting from appview assumptions I had made with too little—or perhaps too much—thought. I needed to take my work and generalize it for other apps.
release.software
With the help of a crack team of ATProto/software development experts (and a domain courtesy of ), I'm reworking the dist.town lexicons into something usable by anyone. I would like to tentatively introduce you to release.software:
This is a work-in-progress set of lexicons and recommendations for publishing and consuming software via AT Protocol. The publishing story is more or less stable, but there is still work to be done on version consumption, changelog management, writing clearer docs, tooling, and a coat of paint.
It would be a tremendous help if you took a look and gave me your feedback. You can either @ me on Bluesky, or open an issue on Tangled. Build it into your application or pipeline at your own risk, but let me know what parts you rely on so I can grasp the ergonomics.
On a personal note, I'm having a great time puzzling through the mechanics of software publication—much more so than writing code. It's been a tremendous help to have so many folks who are simultaneously interested in using my work and knowledgeable/willing to advise me in the process of building it.
I've never been good at asking for help—not to say that I'm good at it now—but the ATProto community continues to be a welcoming and healing environment as I work to address that. My heartfelt thanks to those of you who have supported me or spoken up for me.
I think that @graham.systems is doing really cool low level thinking that doesn't get enough eyeballs and I'm perpetually impressed at his outputs.
Other projects
A handful of other little things I've worked on:
NixOS-ifying everything. I recently installed it on my desktop, and I've almost entirely avoided booting back into Windows in the last 3 weeks. I've logged something like 50 hours of Cyberpunk 2077 (with raytracing on) without many problems.
leadline, a self-hostable ticket tracker/kanban board. Instead of dumping tasks directly in the backlog, you collaboratively build user story maps with others, then derive tasks from the exercise.
mural, an experimental realtime Bluesky client. It subscribes to everybody you follow via Jetstream, then renders a masonry grid of only posts containing visual media.
As one might expect from recapping the last 4 months, that felt like a lot. I look forward to next week when I can be more granular.
Thanks to everyone who poked me about getting these notes released, and thanks to you for reading this far! I hope you have a great week.