Week 5: Quality of life, friction, papercuts...

In this business, we have a lot of ways of saying "hey, you know this kind of sucks, right?" I like to think of it as analogous to the 50 Words for Snow concept -- which, with all due to respect to Kate Bush for her album title, I believe has actually been discredited since as an overly exoticized way of viewing Inuit languages, but then again, I did a linguistics undergrad in the late 2000s, and it was popular at that time -- where am I going with this? Oh, right. We have a lot of ways for saying that something kind of sucks because a lot of things in open source software development kind of suck :)

In some ways, that's the whole premise of open source! (I have now offended both cultural anthropologists and Richard Stallman in just two paragraphs, this is a pretty good Thursday morning for me.) We make software, maybe or maybe not aligned with some financial incentive, that's fit for a particular purpose, and we try to do that in a way that supports external contributions and is aligned with community expectations of shared ownership and of valuing one another's work. Miraculously, other people figure out how to build and deploy the software. At some point in time, we hear words like "maintainability" and "sustainability" and try not to visibly wince, and then we open a job posting for a Devrel hire.

I joke, of course, and not least because Bluesky was already doing a fantastic job of Devrel and community functions before I started in this role. It helps that it's baked so deeply into the project's DNA -- we never get tired of saying that AT and the Atmosphere are our real product. But having said that, we do in fact have lots of developer friction, lots of potential papercuts, and lots of room for quality of life improvements. A major way we're planning to fix that is with a relaunch of our Atmosphere docs site (coming soonish!), but in the meantime, I've been finding my way into a lot of smallish gaps and trying to proactively fill them. This, by the way, is one of the best parts of joining a relatively small team; you get to be part of the process of turning spackle into, well, process.

What has that looked like for me lately?

Turning a bunch of half-documented recommendations into a new Going to Production guide for PDS hosters, which led to...

Cutting a new release of the PDS docker image to include goat, the Go AT (get it?) CLI tool. This came about because lots of folks with container-only deployments were wanting to run our pdsadmin tooling from within the container, and that tooling is in fact a wild weave of shell scripts that goat is a better and better replacement for. Looking into how that updated image got distributed in turn led to...

Changing the upstream version of Watchtower provided with our default PDS deployment, and letting the community know.

After all that, the dedicated Bluesky docs got some love too -- we clarified how rate limiting works for bot developers and replaced our not-so-well maintained app showcase with a link to the Bluesky Directory, a project of Limeleaf Co-op. I'm excited about this latter move especially because we are always looking for ways to help get our community partners to prominence and sustainability, and because they were doing a better job here than we were! This should give us both some better data points for what this kind of indexing and curation ought to entail.

Many of these fixes were a direct result of community members bringing up gaps or unclear assumptions (stay tuned next week for some news along those lines about the Dreaded Laramie OAuth), and I'm so pleased that they could all flow into one another the way they did, and each gave me an excuse to reach out to individuals to say "by the way, this should be fixed now!" That is just about the best part of my job, and really helps me to balance visible and invisible work on a weekly basis.

While I was in plumber mode this week, a lot of our luminaries were busy at Eurosky Live talking about the future of decentralized social networks. Relatedly, we had a proud moment (and a nice little boost in registrations) this week when we survived a Cloudflare outage completely unscathed (we have only good things to say about bunny.net), which served as a nice little reminder of why centralizing the entire internet on a half-dozen companies might not be the best idea.

By the way! If you were afraid I couldn't count and skipped right from Week 3 to Week 5 on this blog, I'm happy to share that Week 4 was actually a guest spot on Atmosphere community member extraordinaire Bailsey Townsend's AMAA blog, which I shared with my Devrel colleague Jim Ray. So if you missed that one, go take a look! Until next time.