I see the Bluesky team finally found a way to bring in some revenue.

Regarding the experiment, I genuinely believe the current way we’re building software is outdated. We can do so much better, we can have more user agency and enable it for less technical folks. Easily build any UI sitting on top of pieces of data & logic. Create, adapt, remix; diffuse.

Apple Music needs a “sort by most listened” option

I revealed the @inkandswitch.com secret plan behind our work on local-first software this year at @localfirstconf.com. Now you can learn it too: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s8O...

Give me a long enough interesting podcast and I shall clean the world

You know a new @inkandswitch.com essay dropped when the malleable software feed explodes with activity bsky.app/profile/did:.... Excited to give it a read!

This is something we’ve been thinking about a bit for @dxos.org & Composer as well. We have an existing identity system (HALO) but it would be very cool to be able to send space invitations to someone just based on their atproto did handle, even if they don’t have a HALO identity yet.

I was considering whether or not I should buy a magic keyboard just so that I could use touch id while my mac is docked at my desk. Evidently, I'm not the only one to have encountered this dilemma because not only does this exist, but its more expensive than the magic keyboard and yet still sold out

one must imagine sisyphus decentralizing the web somewhat

Hurrah! The first non-test post to show up in the @graze.social feed I made for “malleable software” mentions bsky.app/profile/did:...

Meet Composer. A collaborative local-first workspace with customizable AI assisted workflows. Think of it as an IDE for your team where users can install and customize plugins from a growing open source community. 🧵

Reading @adapalmer.bsky.social’s Terra Ignota and, from some offhand statements in later books, it becomes clear that Canada became part of the EU at some point. Remarkably prescient. That seems much less science fiction today than it would have even 6 months ago and the books are from 4 years ago.

Finally getting around to integrating with passkeys on top of HALO. I’m now boarding the passkey hype train.

Apple's commitment to the global settings app is frustrating sometimes. There's so many settings that would make a lot more sense in-flow within apps. For example, the cross fade setting for the music app is not accessible from the music app itself. Why?

Come hang out next week and see what we've been cooking 🧑‍🍳

Another UX concept that we've been experimenting with in Composer's deck layout is something we call "attention". Attention supercharges the OS/web primitive of focus and imbues it with application level information about what exactly is currently in focus.

"A perspective is by nature limited. It offers us one single vision of a landscape...The more complex the object we are attempting to apprehend, the more important it is to have different sets of eyes, so that these rays of light converge and we can see the One through the many."

Stacks and decks bring to mind this tweet from @gordon.bsky.social. They start to allow you to combine individual controls (words) into larger structures like stacks and decks (sentences and paragraphs).

A core part of the default layout in Composer is a component we call the "deck". If you've ever used TweetDeck or @deck.blue the basic layout should make sense, except in this case we've repurposed it to serve as a multi-tasking surface for knowledge work.

Expanding on this, I'd want markdown and rich text to be able to interop before introducing a rich text editor in Composer (though I wouldn't stop anyone else from doing it). Dreaming of a pandoc-like intermediate format that could be used in to store the text data in Automerge.

Managed to get typescript types resolving in a Codemirror editor based on X-Typescript-Types headers from @esm.sh using @val.town's codemirror-ts extension with a bit of help from Claude to glue things together. Gotta love standing on the shoulders of giants.

Another way to think about stacks is by comparing them with another component which has become fairly prevalent in the modern web: block editors. Stacks and block editors accomplish many of the same things but have a different set of trade-offs.

One view into data that we've been experimenting with in Composer is what we call a "stack". A stack is a transclusive view of an ordered collection of objects laid out vertically.

Another interesting Composer concept is the “app graph”, which is a contract for UIs which present, organize and navigate over a graph of the user's knowledge.

Until recently Intents in Composer were completely completely untyped. This of course doesn't make a difference at runtime, but lead to the occasional bug that could have easily been caught by a type system and missed out on the delightful autocomplete DX that types can give you.

Next to Surfaces, Intents are the other core capability which most plugins in Composer provide. Plugins can define different actions and then resolvers which are used to handle those actions when they are dispatched in an Intent.

genuinely enjoy the level of pedantry reached here, all around a good time

Today my daughter said to me “now is later”. I continue to be amazed at how a 4-year-old is capable of this sort of abstract thought but is completely incapable of cleaning up a room without supervision.

It's crazy how much choosing well-suited data structures can effect how easy a time you have writing software. Conversely choosing ill-suited data structures to a problem can lead to bending over backwards to solve it without even realizing why.

“Interoperability is an ecological condition, it’s something that emerges over time, you don’t design it” - @gordon.bsky.social Great conversation here, definitely worth a listen!

It would be very helpful if likes were sorted so that your follows were at the top. This information is just more relevant in a social context but it would also make it so much easier to understand why posts show up in the Popular with Friends feed

I’ve already lost track of what day of the week it is, settling right in to holiday mode

New technology changes the probability space of what’s possible but doesn’t change the fundamentally human problem of communicating with one another.

The observer effect is infuriating. - Software developer debugging code which only works when logging is enabled

I like to imagine a world of "progressive interoperability" where _everything_ is theoretically interoperable, to varying degrees. Can this table be a string? Of course! Can this string be a table? Perhaps. What about this obscure binary format? Not sure, but maybe this AI can figure it out.

Copy and paste interop is very interesting. For example, I can copy cells from Airtable into Google Sheets because they both understand tab separated values. How do these standards evolve? How do we grow the surface area of these touch points?

Breaking ground on refactoring you've been wanting to do for months and months but not gotten around to is incredibly gratifying

Read the paperback earlier this year. Great mind-bending sci-fi, would definitely recommend!

First snow of the winter yesterday meant first trip to clean and clear a neighbourhood bike share bike hub!

Looks like 2026 is the next ICANN application period? newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/applicati...

Given the domain name system Bluesky, clearly needs to sponsor a new TLD right?

Secret Life has been a go to this year. Something about it is just so comforting. Didn’t click on first listen, it’s been on heavy rotation since it did. Great for working, reading, thinking, relaxing.

Another simple but powerful capability that is core to how Composer works is Surfaces. A Surface is a component which allows one plugin to delegate rendering of a subtree to another plugin.

Really grateful for everyone building and pushing forward positive social uses for technology.

Building decentralized software is a constant battle between the principled and the conventional ways forward. @jay.bsky.team et al have done a fantastic job of pragmatism here: making an open ecosystem with credible exit while retaining the approachability needed for mainstream adoption.

Open protocols are awesome

“It doesn’t matter if you take the containers with [a] thousand kilos of cocaine. They keep sending it,” Urve added. “Maybe we should stop counting the numbers and the kilograms and instead look [at] what effect did this action have?" - Dark Wire by @josephcox.bsky.social

Will continue to dig in further to some of these capabilities, starting with the ones provided by host itself. The host plugin both provides and receives two capabilities: root and context.

I’ve never been sick more often than since having a kid, they’re incubators of all of the most annoying seasonal viruses.

"Answer this skill testing question based on the linked article in order to reply"