Year 2024 review

2024 was a pretty intense year for me in terms of coding… and a pretty not-intense one for anything else 🫣 I was so completely absorbed with building my Bluesky-related projects. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to be able to work on things which are based on my own ideas and needs, which give me fun problems to solve, let me learn a lot, and which seem to be helping a lot of other people.

I figured I could look back at this past year and make a summary of what I managed to build and do, since it's been a while since I've done one of those. Yes, I know we're well into February already, I've been procrastinating, sue me. (Also, we've just had an anniversary of Bluesky public launch a few days ago, so that seems like a good excuse too.)

Bluefeeds

Bluefeeds is my internal codename for the Ruby project which runs my main server at blue.mackuba.eu, which includes my feed service, the Handle Directory, statistics and so on.

Skythread

Some of these, like the quotes list and the hidden comments, use data loaded from the Bluefeeds server APIs – since I'm saving all incoming posts to one big-ass table, I can index them by quote source and by thread root, and can use that to look up all quotes of a post or all replies which are supposed to be there in the thread.

Blog

Skyfall

Minisky

New projects & tools

Servers

Oof… that's a lot of stuff 🥲 What's next, in 2025? I… I really think I need to work a bit more on work-life balance (sideproject-life balance?) this year. I feel like I'm doing way too many things. But I have no idea if that's going to happen. I think at least I should try to do a bit more project finishing and a bit less project starting.

First of all, I can't wait to get out of this transitional state with that main service running on three different databases in parallel. I think I'm really close now (though I've been saying this for weeks).

Then, I have all of the above to maintain, OAuth to add to Minisky & Skythread, things like better documentation and tests to add to the open source projects. I have a few ideas for longer blog posts to write, e.g. some kind of architectural introduction to ATProto.

And also… I'd really love to write an AppView one day (but yes, I know, less project starting 😛).