A funny thing happened in the Atmosphere

I was watching @wilb.me live stream on stream.place when @timtrautmann.com mentioned needing a pastebin on the atmosphere, @tynanpurdy.com had suggested something similar to the Boston atproto group a few days before. I'd recently finished the work I wanted to do on a super secret side project so I vowed to build "atmobin" by the end of the day. I had to get a load of laundry in so I left Wil's stream and told Claude to get started while I went off to do chores.

Throwdown

Stream.place has a nice android app I use. So as I loaded my washing machine I got a notification and saw Wil was live still, but now

I jumped on to let Wil know in chat that I was also "speed running" this. Tim suggested we work together, I had other ideas.

In less than an hour both atmob.in (Wil's) and atmobin.lol (mine) were live, the result of an informal adhoc race. Wil declared it a tie on the clock but he definitely won the points on domain name. Being a gracious loser I've moved my app over to use his lexicons where I can.

We should do this more often?

We say in the atmosphere "You can just build things" but to quote the great Dr. Ian Malcom

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should

Now that our foley is in the rearview mirror we can ask "should we have done that". I think not only is the answer yes, but we should do it more.

So with that I'm going to channel @jason.energy and propose an atproto challenge.

The Challenge

1 Lexicon, 5 Apps, 3 Hours, 1 Winner

Or something like that, the idea would be to design a lexicon (or set of lexicons more likely) up-front and then have several people build apps which use them. Ideally We'd have a generic enough lexicon that we could get several distinct apps that share a data model. We'd do it as a speed run on a live stream for something like 3 hours — unless we really want to make it longer. Then have a voting process via userinput.app and atstore.fyi .

Why?

If "We can just build things" isn't enough justification then let me give you some more.

It's a showcase of how lexicons enable interop in the atmosphere

It gives us several open source projects that we have a video walk through of the build process to point new devs to

It further highlights community bits, stream.place , atstore.fyi , userinput.app , happyview.dev , marque.at , etc

It will be fun — this is probably the most important part

So let's gather the atmosphere's best builders (or at least people I can sucker into this) and build somethings!

Logistics

I'm going to be traveling in August and won't be able to commit to organizing this. If someone wants to steal my idea and pull this together quickly I'll commit to watching the whole stream, although maybe via VOD. Honestly if @jason.energy steals this idea I'll count myself lucky and host an in-person watch party when the @codetv.dev episode drops.

Assuming this is on me to organize, I do think I'll tie it to the release of permissioned data. That will put the onus on @dholms.at and team to set the schedule, it will also mean we're all building on permissioned data which will be an unfamiliar surface and help level the playing field.

In the meantime, feel free to challenge me to an at-proto speed run, I'm game.