This is issue 005 of href.email, your dose of interesting links about tech, dev and design.

Over the weekend, Bluesky exploded in various tech bubbles. As we're still seeking a cosy home to move to from X, Bluesky has become the flavor of the month.

Bluesky is built on the Atmosphere—more commonly named the AT Protocol. It was created as a more scalable alternative to ActivityPub (popularized by Mastodon). The ATProto for distributed systems engineers article is a nice illustrated overview of the technical details.

Put X, Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky on a bench and they look like quadruplets. But Bluesky has a few interesting features we don't see in other places: domain handles, custom feeds, and starter packs.

• Usernames on Bluesky are @{name}.bsky.social, but you can add a TXT record to your domain to use it as your account handle. Those vanity domains you've been squatting for years might finally come to use!
• Bluesky displays a chronoligical feed of accounts you're following (what a breath of fresh air!) In addition to the algorithmic Discover feed, the AT protocol supports custom feeds. This makes it easier to set up your own feed using a custom algorithm like mutuals (posts from users who are following you back) or popular with friends (a mix of popular content from accounts you follow and content that your follows like) or topical content like science and cats.
• Anyone can create starter packs: lists of profiles that can be followed in bulk. This is a great way to avoid the initial dead feed and increase Bluesky's adoptation. For example tech managers, people from the Laravel ecosystem, or a list of inspiring web developers. Even if you don't hit that Follow all button to kickstart your feed, they're a great curated resource to discover profiles to follow individually.

• shadcn (creator of shadcn) shared a bunch of cool Tailwind techniques on X.

• Ulysse Carion strolls around the world's weirdest timezones to help us understand how computers deal with time.

• Hot on the heels of last week's fun-git-stuff issue: git supports notes on commits. Useful to store discussions and log decisions without being tied to GitHub or another provider.

• If you have a large TypeScript codebase, it might be worth running Knip to surface dead code. Tom MacWright was a happy customer. "I was able to prune more than 5 unused dependencies and a few hundred lines of code in 20 minutes by using knip’s suggestions. Bravo!"

• In addition to start/center/end, flexbox supports baseline alignment; especially useful for checkboxes and radio buttons.

• Do you prefer small functions or deep functions? "Functions should do one thing. They should do it well. They should do it only." or "Splitting a method introduces additional interfaces which increases complexity." Cory House conducted a poll and after nearly 2,000 votes the results are… 50.4% vs 49.6%. Pretty amazing how close both camps ended up.