Bluesky for Software Engineering folks

There’s a renewed interest in Bluesky as an alternative to social media platforms like Twitter/X. Let’s fast track your onboarding…

Sign Up / Choosing a Handle / Custom Domains

You can easily change your handle after sign-up. Go to https://bsky.app/ and click Sign Up. I just used my X/Twitter handle to start.

Go to Settings (⚙️) and under Advanced click `@ Change Handle` button, and click I have my own domain — it’s as simple as adding a TXT DNS record to your domain and verifying it. Need help or want multiple subdomains? Check out the guide here.

While you’re on Settings, don’t forget to enable Two-factor authentication!

Finally, once you have your handle sorted, note that you can add it to your GitHub profile! Just copy and paste your profile URL into the ‘Social accounts’ section of your GitHub profile.

The quality of ‘Discover’ content

When I first signed up I was not impressed by how irrelevant the content was on the ‘Discover’ tab. To be fair, the app was prompting me to follow 10 people and like 10 posts. Bluesky needs some data points to ‘learn’ what you like. It’s not ideal, but just be patient — it’s worth it — the quality of content and signal-to-noise ratio after you follow folks and like posts will, in my experience, be significantly better than other platforms. Before we jump into that, there’s a little configuration you might want to do…

Moderation

Go to ⚙️ Settings > Moderation.

Click ‘Muted words & tags’ — for common themes of content in the ‘Discover’ tab which you don’t like, it might help to mute some words.

Back under Moderation, click the ‘Bluesky Moderation Service’ and consider adjusting some moderation settings to your liking.

One other tip: as you see posts/accounts in ‘Discover’ which you don’t like, click the ⋯ icon on the post and click ‘Show less like this’, or click on their profile and click ⋯ icon and ‘Mute Account’.

Who to follow

You need to follow 10 folks and like 10 posts. But where can you find people to follow? Bluesky has the concept of ‘Starter Packs’, which anyone can create and add to their Profile page under the Starter Packs tab there.

Here’s a few Starter Packs to get you… started:

• Bluesky for Software Engineering Folks <- I’ve created this based on folks I’ve found posting on Bluesky who I previously had followed and liked the content of on Twitter/X — if you have any suggestions for what to add, please reach out.
• Distributed Systems — Folks talking distributed systems, programming languages, and container technology.
• Observability Starter Pack — People on exciting Observability.
• Tech Managers — Engineering Managers, VPs, CTOs, CDOs, Tech Leads and alike in research fields and tech companies.

Backend programming language/framework starter packs:

• Pythonistas — Python.
• Laravel Friends — PHP/Laravel.
• Go contributors — Go/Golang.
• Rustaceans — Rust.
• Ruby and Rails — Ruby/Rails.

Front-end / JavaScript & TypeScript starter packs:

• Node.js & JavaScript.
• Vite Ecosystem.
• Remix/React Router Adjacent.
• Syntax.fm Guests — everyone who has been on an episode of Syntax.
• Web performance pack — web performance (front end) content and conversation.
• CSS Tricks — Writing about front-end things.
• UI — folks who specialize in the craft of user-interfaces (designers, engineers, content creators and more).
• UX Sky — UX designers, UI designers, content designers, user researchers, product managers, information architects, and other folks in the same vein who are active on Bluesky.

Mobile-related starter packs:

• React Native.
• Expo Team.
• Apple Developers — iOS, macOS, visionOS, watchOS, and tvOS devs.
• Android Dev.

Infrastructure & Networking related starter packs:

• Infrastructure Engineers — People posting about databases, stream processors, orchestrators, virtual machines, and more.
• Network Engineering Starter Pack.
• Platform Engineering Starter Pack.
• Packet Herders — Net engineers doing net engineer things.
• Cloud Native — People involved in Cloud Native and Kubernetes ecosystem.
• AWS Developer Experience.
• AWS Serverless — People in the AWS Serverless space.

Even if you follow a subset of that, and go through some recent posts of folks on there and like some of those posts, then wait say 1 day, your ‘Discover’ feed should now be in great shape!

A note on Accessibility

Go to Settings > Accessibility (https://bsky.app/settings/accessibility) and turn on the “Require alt text before posting” setting.

Learn more about Bluesky

The underlying ‘AT protocol’ is very interesting and the engineering behind building Bluesky is also worth reading about. I particularly liked reading about and then playing with the atproto-browser here.

The real question I have is — why now? Bluesky initially took off in 2023, but what in October 2024 made this ‘second wave’ of signups occur? Was it the $15M Series A they raised, the now-deleted “This is my last Twitter post” Kelsey Hightower tweet (actually, he deleted is account 👏), or some other force?

Either way, there’s a lot of interesting content happening on Bluesky, so I hope you enjoy being there as much as me! Feel free to follow me on Bluesky and say hi.