I’m started writing this from Z-Space in Vancouver, at the Atmosphere Afterpartea. Who knows when this will go live.
This week has been crazy for me, as I travelled to Vancouver, Canada to attend the 2026 ATmosphereConf!! My first time out of country. My first conference. My first time meeting a bunch of online friends in person. My first time properly presenting femme in public.
A lot happened so I’m going to go sorta day-by-day on what I got up to here.
Wednesday#
Wednesday was pretty chill for me, not much happened as it was the day I flew out to Vancouver. My first flight was about 5pm in Melbourne so I spent the rest of the day mostly chilling as I’d packed the night before. The flight to Sydney was chill, had an empty seat next to me so I had a bunch of extra room. Then I had a ~13 hour trip all the way to Vancouver. For the most part it was pretty good, but I ended up not being able to sleep during it for some reason which reaaaaally sucked. We landed without a hitch and that brought us to…
…Wednesday, again?#
Yep. Thanks to the magic of ✨timezones✨ I arrived in Vancouver before I had left Melbourne, by about 45 minutes. I met up with the friends I’ve been staying with and went to our airbnb. We went to a Thai restaurant for dinner, had a nice meal there, and then went back to our place for the night.
Thursday#
I wasn’t able to sleep well Thursday night; jet lag was kicking my ass. As a result I was super tired all day which really sucked. We went out to have breakfast at a cafe just down the street, and then split up a bit to do some different things.
Despite the tiredness, I went out with a few of the friends, and we went to a local thrift shop which was a vibe, as well as also going grocery shopping for dinner that night. Dinner was braised pork belly with bok choy and rice, and oh man it was really good. It got served in bowls that weren’t really up to the task of having such solid food in them - way too tall and not wide enough, definitely more of a soup bowl or something - but we were able to make do.
I went to have a lie down on my bed to rest a little bit and relax watching some videos, but I ended up inadvertently taking a nap for a few hours, missing one of our other friends dropping by and making hot chocolate, which was pretty sad but I was just that tired. I had a quick shower and then went to bed for the day at a pretty good time.
Friday#
Thankfully I was able to sleep pretty well that night. Got almost 7 hours in, which is better than average for me 😅. I went to breakfast at a cafe - Toña Bakery & Café - with just one of the others, got an iced matcha latte and a cinnamon knot with cream cheese icing (both very nice), and chilled for the rest of the morning. It was a very pretty spot, I really enjoyed the colour scheme and general aesthetic.
Sometime after 1pm I decided to go over to the pre-conference to meet people and wait for the workshop taking place later in the afternoon. I picked up my badge and decorated it with some of the stickers there, and then had lunch in the lounge area while waiting. The workshop was Bailey and Fig’s at://advent thing - a “daily” challenge for learning atproto concepts, similar to an advent of code. While I already know a lot about the atmosphere, it was a good excuse to try out some atex stuff to make sure it’s working correctly, as well as a little bit about repos which I still haven’t gotten around to with my own dev work yet, but soon!
Friday evening all of us in the airbnb and a few more went out to a really nice Lebanese restaurant - Nuba in Kitsilano - and had dinner together, ordering a bunch of dishes and sharing them between us. It was great to be able to properly meet everyone in person and talk a lot about the Atmosphere over great food.
Saturday#
Saturday was the first proper day of the conference, and boy was it jam-packed.
I went to a lot of talks, including one about the differences between a feature, product, and business; the economics of community infrastructure in the Atmosphere; centring user consent, even when dealing with cryptographic security; and a few others I can’t recall at the moment.
There was an afterparty that evening, at what apparently turned out to be a gay bar of some sorts from what I’ve from others who stayed the entire night https://bsky.app/profile/faineg.bsky.social/post/3miasgy622k22. I was only there for a few hours because I started to get a headache and was preeetty tired and needed to go to bed. Regardless, the music selection from the DJs hired for the event was really good and so was the food.
Sunday#
Sunday breakfast was catered at the conference venue - I didn’t realise it was catered Saturday as well, but pretty cool they did that - some pretty nice pork and egg breakfast sandwiches.
I went some really great internationalisation/localisation talks in the morning; learnt a bunch about the importance of it, the impact of non-English users, and some of the challenges that can be faced when dealing with languages that have features English doesn’t have. I found them to be the most interesting of the talks I went to personally, will possibly update this and link to them here once VODs go live.
During lunch - which was also really good, seriously the catering team at UBC killed it, I hope we get food as good as this at future events - I managed to get atex version 0.8 released out to the public, and I’m super happy with my progress on it. I filled out 4 new feature areas with it: cryptography utils, a PLC client, service auth token validation utils, and an XRPC server router, the last of which I’m very proud of.
I went to another, smaller, afterparty at Z-Space in Vancouver (where I started writing this lol), which was relatively low-key but still a fun atmosphere.
One thing that really stood out to me was just how diverse the conference was. Compared to what you’d usually expect to see from a typical tech conference, there was an incredible amount of women, Black & Asian people, and trans, non-binary and other LGTBQ+ people not only just attending but also presenting talks, which really helped to make me feel like I belong.
The vibes were immaculate, and I had so much fun getting to meet everyone in person and listen to the various talks. I’m super exhausted now but it’s been well worth it. I can’t wait for the next one, I’m definitely going to do everything I can to make it - I might even try do a talk of my own about what I’ve been doing in the Atmosphere.