023 — Hacking the Starter Packs

All Play w/ Ryan Hefner

So, what do you do when you start to run into walls, or slow downs, on the project you’re working on? I feel like I am at, or approaching one of those slow downs, and am trying to get ahead of it.

Since my last update when I announced Starter Packs, I have been busy continuing to build the logged out experience of the site. Focusing on gathering as many references as possible to the Starter Packs on Bluesky, and coming up with ways to make the firehose consumption more resilient, while baking in some features into the site that will allow me to capture more Starter Packs instances as people explore the site. So far things have been going great, but I am feeling the resistance creeping in and I am trying to resist it.

Where I am at now is that I pretty much has the explore experience dialed in. You can search for Starter Packs, along with Profiles, on the site, and freely explore packs and the people in them, along with being able to explore profiles, the Starter Packs they have created, along with the people they follow, and those who follow them. All in all, I am pretty stoked with where the site has come over a couple of weeks of working on it, and still pretty excited on where I can take it, but I am kind of slowing down a bit due to hesitancy on a few things, and I am not liking it.

Where I am slowing down is on the integration of OAuth’ing into the site to allow for authenticated actions to be performed, like following everyone in a Starter Pack, or following individual profiles. In the early days of the project, I created a quick (which actually turned into a multi-day) proof of concept of getting the ATProto OAuth setup working, but I haven’t really touched it since. Fortunately, it looks like it still works, but now I am trying to pair it with my own account handling and authentication and I don’t feel like I have crafted a setup that I am fully confident in, which has made me lose a bit of steam.

So, with that said, I am publicly committing to getting OAuth integrated into the site, and having all the following functionality added in over the next couple of days, so I can at least get it out there and then evaluate what I like, or don’t like, about the setup and then adjust. My concern about launching something I am not confident in is due to the higher than normal amount of traffic the site is getting, and I really don’t want to roll something out that ultimately ends up breaking, but I guess I will just have to cross that bridge when it comes.

For now, I am committed on getting the OAuth out, expanding the actions that people can perform while authenticated, and continuing to build some of the features behind the scenes that I would ultimately want to charge people a subscription for, but more on that at a later time.

To check out the current status of the site, check out https://www.starterpacks.net. You can follow along for updates on both the Starter Packs Bluesky account, @starterpacks.net, along with my personal account on Bluesky, @ryanhefner.com. Let me know what you think, and if there are any other features you would like to see added to the site and I will try to work those in.

To follow along, you can find me at ryanhefner.com, follow me on Bluesky @ryanhefner.com and keep up with the show on allplay.fm and @allplay.fm.

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM
Fathom Analytics