Adventures in the ATproto

I started up my own Bluesky PDS last week.  I used digital ocean and the premade image to make life easier for myself and give myself a digital playground rather than get bogged down in local networking.  Eventually I would like to host my own PDS fully from home, but I have a lot to learn before we get there.  

Setting up the PDS was very straightforward as they have good documentation online as well as active discord channels.  I did have to reset the password on the test account I created as I didn't copy it down correctly but it worked well fast and the account is online now.  The PDS is at codeslice.quest 

The name is just a fun domain I grabbed for this project, I always liked the term code slicer from Star Wars and quest domains are priced as a reasonable buy right now.  

I did sign up for a free Resend account to add email auth but something is still misconfigured there as it still has not verified my email.  I'll be debugging that this coming week.

Looking forward to starting to automate posts and other operations through scripts, maybe even create my own lightweight posting app. 

My own PDS

A few days ago I started up my own ATprotocol PDS.  I want to get deeper into the fediverse.  I was able to attend the first ATmosphereCon last year and it was wonderful to hear everyone's ideas.  

I spun up the PDS on Digital Ocean using my own domain.  I wanted to originally self host on a Raspberry Pi 4b I have sitting around but decided a VPS would be better.  One, because I can host it in the EU for better stability and privacy (yes it's a public protocol, but how that data can be used is also important). Two, I get familiar with a platform other than GCP, and three, it will hopefully be the springboard into some portfolio projects around the fediverse.  

Looking forward to what I come up with and learning on this journey. 

Upgraded

I've been working on finally transitioning to Windows 11 on my desktop.  

I've almost got my data backups done.  I've got my Synology NAS setup in RAID 1 holding all the photos and videos I've digitized over the years.  

I still have some personal VHS tapes to transfer over and a bunch of CDs to copy as well.  

I'm still looking for a physical data storage medium.  CDs have too short a shelf life and more and more cd drives are going out.  

Flash storage is nice but unpredictable and I'm not sure I would ever keep track of that many USB drives.  

The search continues for now. 

Class defined

I finished my latest class at Oregon State on my way to my CompSci degree.  I'm taking a quarter off to concentrate on job searching, and to drill in more leetcode problems to help reinforce the concepts I've learned in my classes.

Outside of python, I'm think Rust will be my next step for learning.  

But for now, I'm back to digitizing my old notes in markdown for eventual hosting on a GitHub blog. 

Conference Ends

Quick last post about PyCon 2025.  I'm definitely headed back in the future.  The networking opportunity and genuine connections made at every table make it the best conference I have attended.

I just finished up my Data Structures class at Oregon State and am going to be taking the summer quarter off to concentrate on my job search.  

I'm also going to buckle into my portfolio and try to get a few finished projects online.