Weekly #1: Week of 2025-02-02

Hello!

I've wanted to do this for a while. I found out about weeknotes from a friend - who does her own every week(ish) on sundays. If you don't know, weeknotes are blog posts or weekly summaries published once a week that summarises the week's accomplishments/events/posts, or anything else that happened that week.

I've been thinking about doing structured writing in hopes that it would help me focus, solidify weekly tasks, and be more disciplined in certain aspects. Plus, it's just something I can do to just get whatever I have in my brain down and run with it. No regrets and stuff. This will be my own work as well. No AI here, as stakes aren't nearly as high.

I'm going to try to force myself to get one of these out during the weekend, most likely on sundays. These 'weeklies' will either feature something I've done every single day of the week (listicle style), or just a highlight of stuff I've done throughout the week.

What did I do this week

...you may be asking. Well, this past week was pretty interesting to me. I was terribly sick with some kind of sore throat and bad fever/headache. Luckily, though, I'm on the cusp of recovering right now.

Other than that, though, I did a lot this week! I made two rust services, gizo and geranium. I also finalised the teal.fm stamping flow and did a few small things to atptools towards my goal of implementing custom views for every important lexicon! I'll go in order:

Gizo (as in 偽造カード/counterfeit card 🃏)

Gizo is a link card generator service. I made it because I was worried about using cardyb (Bluesky's card generator service) in my app. So, I made my own. In Rust. It should be mostly API compatible with cardyb, plus it has lru + ttl based memory caching!

Sort of related, did you know that oembeds are handled separately in the Bluesky app? They build them in manually so they can control the dimensions so there's no crazy layout shift! My plan for gizo is to have clients do the same, so they can handle oembeds how they wish instead of me dictating everything via gizo.

Geranium

Have you ever felt guilty that you were abusing others' resources? I have, and while there's no way around it sometimes, when there is I tend to take it. That's what initially got me thinking - I could build my own ATProto image proxy instead of using Bluesky's! When Sam mentioned making an image proxy as a first step to a high quality Instagram clone, I knew exactly what to do. I dove in and ended up making one. In doing so, it was my first time using the Hyper http server library, which has surprisingly good devex for such a low level library. Very pleased.

I put up a demo server, and it looks like it's been operating perfectly fine so far. Here's an image served from said server:

It's really grainy, but that's only because it's the demo server. I've set the jpeg compression to max in this case, but if you deploy it you can set it to whatever you want! Hopefully people only use it for testing, but if someone somehow wants to use such low quality images, please go for it but also please let me know first.

teal.fm updates

Teal.fm is an ATProto-based music scrobbling service. Well, that's what it's supposed to be. Most of the team has prior obligations and thus can't spend as much time on it, so development has all but stalled. But, that's where I come in! I don't really have prior obligations and hiring is pretty slow currently, so I can devote some time to it in between all my other stuff.

State of teal.fm

Currently, we have done:

• manual scrobbling
• jetstream ingest
• all the xrpc routes we have lexicons for
• docs (inc'l auto documenting of all the lexicons we use in teal.fm)

What's to come (when one of us can work on it), ordered by priority:

• track matching api
• ingester rewrite (in rust)
• move from sqlite to postgres/clickhouse
• last.fm import
• more xrpc routes
• your teal.fm profile/separate social graph
• and more!

I've recently laid out and finalized the manual scrobbling feature, and hopefully we can get that out to a few users soon here.

atp.tools updates

I've added a few more views in pursuit of having all important lexicons be 'view'able. These ones were easy - the bluesky actor profile, and feed repost/like. I've also made a few layout changes, so there's no scrollbar on the right when there doesn't need to be.

What did I listen to this week?

I've been hooked on my sad songs playlist recently. Also lots of alt/rock. Think My Chemical Romance, Paramore, The 1975. Surprisingly nice to listen to while getting stuff done.

What did I play this week?

Metaphor Refantazio! It feels like I'm almost done with it - I'm at the part right before the last two dungeons, when that lil twist happens!

I've also been getting into Satisfactory, I like it so far but I can't play more than like two hours of it before my brain turns to mush.

Um, anyways

That should be it! Hopefully you enjoyed reading my first Weekly as much as I did writing it. This format is really nice to get my ideas out when I have them, so expect something similar next week.

p.s. I'm really glad I made the comments component for my guestbook, so I can just use it here!

Comments

Thoughts? Questions? Responses? Feel free to let me know on Bluesky!