Hello all, when I started working on my current website back in 2021, the initial goal was to collect everything that I’ve done in a single place, and in doing so, to also own and move stuff away from the big-tech platforms.

I had stopped posting on instagram around 2019 and was not ecstatic about the decline of blogger where I used to write, or blogs in general. I wanted a home for not just these, but also for sharing what I am reading, or my hobby experiments at cooking as I like to do that.

For all this, a personal website was perfect. But I also wanted to keep things local, self owned and reduce as many dependencies as possible. I chose markdown(or MDX for interactivity) for writing instead of a CMS as it benefitted from the tangibility of files, stored within the repo. Also, storing images locally, perhaps served through a CDN, and so on. Essentially everything on a file instead of a DB as much as possible.

Over time, this lead to further optimisations. I wanted to disentangle from growing monopolies like Vercel and their chokehold on the current js ecosystem and libraries¹. So moving from Nextjs to Astro, simpler static builds with select CSR, hosted on a cheap €1 VPS.

However, at the same time, this meant that I was essentially creating an archive. If there is no-one discovering and reading/visiting the website (and let’s be honest, who visits websites in today’s age. In this AI economy? Naah..) it was all just a nice archive for some random person to discover once a year.

I was still fine with that. But, I believe that it changes now.

With ✨✨✨ AT Protocol ✨✨✨

I’ve been following the ecosystem since last year, and lately engaging and writing about things AT-proto. If you don’t know, it is the tech behind Bluesky. Perhaps the best introduction to it is this post by Dan Abramov that I shared in the very first edition of this newsletter.

I think a decentralised web, as imagined by AT-proto is a thoughtful, approachable, and a realistically scalable idea. It puts you, the user as the owner of all of your data, in focus; essentially disentangling from the corporation or app that may decide to shut-down, pivot, or lock down². They may define the schema(a lexicon) but you store your data and can use the same lexicon to do whatever you want with it.

This brings the best of both worlds for someone like me. I can share and post things on one platform (or more), and can still use the same data to power my personal website for archival purposes; or support interaction within the website through the same protocol.

I can write on leaflet, pckt, or offprint(all of which collaborate to use the same lexicon by the way), and show it on my website. I can share photos on grain.social and have those show up on a separate page. I can move all of my Goodreads history, start using popfeed for updates, interact with others, and still have my reading list show up on my homepage.

All this dynamic content on my website now runs, or will later run³ through the at-proto api, which reads from the open web that provides my public data through the stream(firehose) of events that my actions create.

The ATmosphere⁴ is still a green-field and buzzing with ideas; some entirely new enabled by the protocol, some re-imagined in the ecosystem.

I can’t remember the last time I was as excited about something as I am for the possibilities here. Do check it out if you haven’t.

Also, if you want to connect, you can find my anywhere on the Atmosphere with my handle @usaa.ma

This was a much longer write-up than I usually do, but this week, I have been mostly thinking about and doing things around this, and I didn’t want to create a separate blog post for this.

Interesting reads

1. Compile to Architecture
   Architecture is what matters in the age where generating code, using any framework, is cheap.

2. The trajectory of ArtemisII moon mission is a feat of engineering
   The halfway point on this mission happens tomorrow

   

3. Advice to young people…
   It is a longer read, but if you’re young, maybe bookmark.

4. Wasps: If you can’t love them, at least admire them
   The article starts pretty strong, but is a fun read

A project I discovered

Audio streaming app on the atmosphere

I like that everything is open, including the choices of tech and costs to run them.

zzstoatzz.io/plyr.fm at main

audio streaming app

A photo I took

Thanks for reading through. Until next week 👋