Atmospheres and Soundtracks

Hello! This is the first-ever edition of What’s Matt Building?, which I’m just now realizing is a bit of a weird name for a newsletter, because that question mark will inevitably prove my undoing. Ah, well.

We’ll keep these newsletters short and sweet. I’ll talk about some things I’ve been building lately, some things I’ve written, and some general thoughts for the week. We’ll see if it’s a weekly newsletter or something slightly less frequent.

What I’ve been building

This week’s been a bit all over the place, as we’ve been traveling and I’m changing jobs. (Hello, old and new coworkers who’ve surprised!) But I’ve also had some fun opportunities to build things, and my building focus has very much been in AT Protocol, which you may know from its implementation at Bluesky. This explainer from Dan Abramov is well worth your time.

I’ve really dove headfirst into Atproto over the last few weeks, and I’m super happy to talk about two web apps I built on the Atmosphere. The first is a pretty simple music-scrobbling app I built with the Discogs and MusicBrainz APIs. There’s an alpha lexicon (that explainer I linked to above will tell you all about lexicons) from a group called teal.fm that I utilized, and the basic idea is that I’ve long found myself wanting to track the music I listen to on vinyl. I mostly built this one for a presentation at an internal work engineering conference, but it was a fun project.

My second web app of the week was a tool to track daily game plays called dailygame.space, which, again, I built with Atproto as the data source. I also published the lexicon, which was a first for me. It’s thankfully pretty straightforward, as I really just needed to add a TXT record to the dailygame.space DNS and publish the lexicon to a @dailygame.space repository.

This one exists because, like many people, I like to play a variety of those daily games (I’ve been playing Clues by Sam recently). Having a quick way to see the games I play was my top priority, but I’ve also expanded it into streak tracking, user preferences, and more. We’ll see how this one evolves, but it’s already seen a tiny bit of traction.

What I’ve been writing

I’ve done a bit less writing this week, so this should be a short one.

One great album