Some contributions and projects from the last few weeks
August 06, 2026
After meeting some amazing and people at Local-First Conf in Berlin this year, I felt invigorated to finally start contributing to projects, particularly in the atmosphere. Here's a list of my submissions, and some reflections at the end.
At Local First Lab Day, they hosted a session where we could use custom javascript to modify the punchcards on our Tangled profiles. I replaced mine with an RSS-like feed of my Bluesky activity
I was looking for ways to contribute there, and one issue talked about adding preview deploys. It seemed like Tangled was missing the required workflow filters for creating/destroying ephemeral environments, which lead to the last PR in the previous section.
Discussed claiming npm orgs. Orta added ability to claim publish rights in an npm org. I'm trying to make the case that an entire org should be claimable
I also threw together a headless CMS that stores its data on your PDS, after watching talk about doing this for a friend's artist page at the meetup stream
Overall a fun couple of weeks! I'm back at work from vacation, so likely won't be able to keep up the same cadence.
The biggest thing I want to improve at is to properly contribute beyond code. Discussions, issues. But this is particularly daunting as I'm not accustomed to what is appropriate. As a stranger, it seems fine to open issues. Critiquing someone else's issue, slightly less fine. Reviewing someone's PR (as a non-maintainer)? Grating.
I'm also scared of doing "drive-by" PRs. Some PRs I've opened an issue immediately and started working on without anyone telling me a PR would be welcome. Is that just creating work for a maintainer? An obligation to respond? Am I overthinking this? Probably yes.
Gonna keep at it though! Maybe I'll do another update like this again. Thanks for reading :)
PS: I'm soon going to be looking for developer work in Los Angeles (around Pasadena ideally). Send me your leads!