Speeding up and slowing down

It's probably a good sign that I've barely been finding the time to blog in the last few weeks right?

It's Mid-May right now, which means that we're just nearing the end of "travel every other week" season. It happens like clockwork this way every year, across different jobs, and I'm still not entirely sure why — springtime is nice for coming out of our respective caves, and there are at least a couple conferences that I expect to block time for every year, but it's the "needing to squeeze PTO in on top of that" plus the bonus regional offsites and strategy sessions and meetups that really add up.

It's funny because it makes me seem very glamorous when I'm chatting with my neighbors and trying not to sound like I'm complaining — "well, you know, I had to be in Canada and then Europe, and now I'm headed to Portland and by the way we're overdue for our own vacation". I'm certainly grateful that I have a lifestyle that basically accommodates this part of my job (it more or less takes a village to feed our cats while we're away), and it's certainly good for earning different kinds of loyalty points, but it's also a major relief when travel season comes to a close.

And not just because I love staying home! That part is nice, but what's also nice is being able to rotate back onto more durable, async work, like the good old atproto docs. Some recent additions there:

I got into detail about my recent travel on that last podcast episode, but the TL;DR is that I was in Portland to speak at Write the Docs and wound up being in town for the monthly atproto PDX meetup, which will soon bring the set of regional meetups I've been involved with up to 4: LA, Portland, SF, Toronto (read on for that). And that, my friends, is why rotating from sync to async work is so nice; I get to have nice conversations, weight a whole bunch of feature requests and priorities from those conversations in my head, and go home to give them a more durable form. Feel free to watch my Write the Docs 2026 talk from a couple of weeks ago for a longer version of this take :)

Next up, we have:

Right now, there's not much on the DevRel travel calendar for summertime, but we will have a significant Atmosphere dev presence in Europe this July, between the IETF in Vienna and the Local-First Conference in Berlin. I'd be a bit surprised if I manage to dodge travel commitments for the next two months myself, but who can say.

My next full week without travel is going to start on June 1, and the biggest-ticket item that I've been saving for then is our long-awaited overhaul to the dedicated Bluesky docs to make them more focused on just the services offered by Bluesky Social, and more complementary with the atproto docs overall.

In the meantime, we're cutting a bunch of package releases this week with the goal of being able to declare version 1.0 of our lex SDK. This necessitated a bunch of other version bumps and necessary housekeeping (it was about time for us to get off of Node 18 anyhow):

I'll be spending most of the time this week that I'm in not in SF on making sure our comms and our docs are in order for those SDK bumps. Among other things, this will be a nice move in the direction of being able to signal to LLMs that our newer packages are production-ready and should be the default for new projects, which has been a long time coming (as it was with OAuth scopes).

In other words, lots of upward progress here and there! A nice feeling as we head into the summer months.