at:// pizza thoughts

mini-proposals, guides, ruminations, and other AT stuff

The AT-URI Syntax Mess

Why AT URIs are not valid under IETF RFC-3986, what the impact is, and some possible ways forward.

The AT-URI Syntax Mess

bryan newbold (⛱️ sabbatical mode)|June 29, 2026

Giving Labels More Context

A small tweak to the labeling system to allow richer context and annotations

Giving Labels More Context

bryan newbold (⛱️ sabbatical mode)|June 26, 2026

Firehose cursors could be improved somewhat

Some very in-the-weeds papercuts with event stream sequence numbers, and some ideas to address them

Firehose cursors could be improved somewhat

bryan newbold (⛱️ sabbatical mode)|June 03, 2026

Lexicon Service Docs

Riffing on some ways to make network services more legible to humans and machines

Lexicon Service Docs

bryan newbold (⛱️ sabbatical mode)|April 06, 2026

Expanding the Lexicon Language

Proposes some small additions to lexicon schema language.

Expanding the Lexicon Language

bryan newbold (⛱️ sabbatical mode)|April 03, 2026

Blob AT-URIs

mini-proposal for referencing atproto blobs in AT-URIs

Blob AT-URIs

bryan newbold (⛱️ sabbatical mode)|March 01, 2026

Community Spaces on AT Protocol

Scaled-down design patterns

Community Spaces on AT Protocol

bryan newbold (⛱️ sabbatical mode)|February 04, 2026

Go Lexicon Struct $type

Hacking in 'const' output behavior

Go Lexicon Struct $type

bryan newbold (⛱️ sabbatical mode)|December 12, 2025

Big Indexing

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.

bryan newbold (⛱️ sabbatical mode)|December 06, 2025

Record Versioning

The people, they want post editing!

Record Versioning

bryan newbold (⛱️ sabbatical mode)|November 13, 2025

What's a Pizza thought?

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.

What's a Pizza thought?

bryan newbold (⛱️ sabbatical mode)|November 13, 2025

AT Namespaces for Community Spaces

How should public community-controlled spaces be represented in atproto?

AT Namespaces for Community Spaces

bryan newbold (⛱️ sabbatical mode)|October 11, 2025