oscilloscopes, cycling, snow, big cities, wiki. I like speculating about found objects. protocol engineer @bsky.app (on 2026 summer sabbatical). formerly archive.org elsewhere: bnewbold.net / @bnewbold@social.coop
A couple of weeks ago at Eurosky I talked to some friendly Erlang hackers who wanted to get involved with AT development. The AT network is a big data-intensive distributed system, and it is the sort of thing the BEAM runtime is well-suited for. I know Chad Miller has been using Gleam for parts of Slices, and services like relays, jetstream, and the forthcoming tap tool could all be re-implemented using Erlang-y tools. But I think these tools, written in Go, are already in a pretty good place: they are efficient enough, are not too hard to operate (IMO), and have capacity to scale. hose.cam lists 9 full-network relays from 7 distinct parties.
When I first started working at Bluesky, the team was all remote and I worked out of a rented office. I'd almost always procrastinate lunch and end up walking to a nearby bakery for a late afternoon slice of pizza. Inevitably i'd end up thinking over little protocol warts and design challenges. Sometimes these related to current work priorities, but often they were tangential or just small things that bothered me.