At the end of every Ultimate Frisbee team warmup, our captain would tell us to "do what you need to do". Sometimes I would sit quietly and calm myself, other times the nerves would send me to the bathroom. Often I'd be stuffing my face with food. It'd start healthy and end with candy. All roads lead to sour patch kids. But what I remember most is sitting and laughing with my team mates.

I often feel like I’m not doing enough. I'm not doing enough side projects, writing blog posts, exploring hobbies, earning side income, advancing in my career, so on and so on. I feel it acutely when I witness incredible people doing incredible things.

But I’m trying to find the space to breathe between tasks. To internalise that I can’t, and don’t need, to do everything and that’s okay. Like at the end of a team warmup: do what you need to do.

Onto the newsletter.

npmx - a modern browser for npm registry

npmx has been the most fun I've had working on open source. It's beautiful being a part of a bunch of (mostly) random strangers coming together to work on a shared vision. I feel drawn to it because of that community. I have a couple of posts I want to write about it. But it’s still in its early stages. There’ll be more updates coming soon.

Check it out: https://github.com/npmx-dev/npmx.dev

constellation in the atmosphere

While working on npmx, I learnt about constellation. It's a cool tool that lets you find where a link was used in the Atmosphere. Why is it cool? Well it means I get to delete a bunch of my code, which is always really cool.

I'm currently making multiple calls to bluesky. Paginating over post records. Parsing the record to find and match on link facets. And then getting the first record that mentioned my link to display as my comments.

With constellation, I call blue.microcosm.links.getBacklinks with my url, my did (aka the thing that identifies me), and the source I want to look through (like bluesky posts). There's also a reverse parameter that returns records in ascending order. Once I have the response, I pop the top and I have the first time I've posted about a particular blog post.

stuff that inspired me

Ethan Marcotte wrote about a human moment, and I found it to be very touching. Here's the beginning of the post:

We’d gotten a good three inches of snow overnight. Four? Not sure. Either way, the thing in the main was I’d gotten a late start on shoveling. I’d slept terribly last night, and still had my head submerged in a large mug of coffee when She began lacing her boots

I'm still finding my writing voice (does the search ever end?). And there's something about Ethan's style I love. It feels cozy. I tried to emulate it a little at the start of this newsletter. Not sure I succeeded, definitely a work in progress.

Emma shared her life list at 30. It's got me thinking about my life list, since next week I'll be turning a year older! I'll also be flying to Australia. So I'll have plenty of time to think about my life list. Arguably, too much time. Australia is so far from everywhere.

That's all for this newsletter. Thank you for reading!

Jono