Week 16: FOSDEM Trip Report

I'm back! I'm back from a cross-Atlantic trip that involved a Saturday/Sunday conference, meaning that I've been failing to take adequate time off from work for about 11 days and counting! Let's see how coherent this post turns out :)

I had a great and rewarding trip to Brussels last week with a brief stop over in London, where I was lucky enough to speak at this London Atproto meetup the night I arrived. This was a great introduction to community members like https://bsky.app/profile/aendra.com and https://bsky.app/profile/danabra.mov whose names I'd wanted to put faces to since starting this job; it was also really heartening to see how well we filled the space with a bunch of new faces! I got to deliver what was essentially a rough, longer draft of my FOSDEM talk, which was a nice way to a) remind myself how many people in my audience currently have A LOT of Atproto experience or ZERO Atproto experience (with everything in between), and to get some bonus feedback before the version that was being recorded :)

In fact, my Devrel colleague Jim Ray is presently at a Protocols for Publishers event being held in the same London event space, which sounds like it's going great :)

After sneaking in some culture I went on to Brussels from there. I got to spend a lot more time than I had to date with the IPFS crowd, who have been instrumental to low-level Atproto design decisions, and I particularly enjoyed spending most of my Saturday in the ActivityPub-focused Social Web devroom. There are a lot of design decisions being made in and around Mastodon (special shout out to Björn Staschen's talk) that we can learn a lot from, and it's always useful to hear the ways in which people don't yet see Atproto as meeting all of their distributed social needs.

On Sunday, I wound up in the same room as the good folks from Roost's excellent talk on open moderation tools, and had a really supportive audience for my own talk near the end of the weekend.

All in all, it was an excellent trip, and a great opportunity to chat in person with (in no order) Natalie and Eli from Streamplace, Juliet of PDSls fame, my colleague Matthieu, Laurens of Connected Places, Bumblefudge from IPFS, Riley of AltStore, and many others.

In the meantime, we've been really, really impressed with the growth of npmx this week:

I would keep an 👀 on them!

It's also been extremely cool to see PDSls integration for Raycast:

And I'm looking very forward to this upcoming Atproto CodeTV discussion:

Last but not least, I confirmed this week that I'll be presenting at Write the Docs, one of my very favorite conferences, for the third time this May on the very exciting work we've done on our new docs site. Stay tuned for more there soon. And with that, I need to get back to polishing the new docs for release :)