From Idea to NuGet: My Journey to Publishing a .NET Open Source Library

When I was a kid, I wanted to be two things: an architect and an author. Not the kind of architect who manages cloud infrastructure or the kind of author who writes technology books — but the classic versions of these professions. I drew buildings on graph paper and devoured Roald Dahl and Michael Crichton novels. I was the fourth grader lugging around Jurassic Park, wearing glasses too big for my face, and dreaming big.

Fast forward to adulthood: I didn’t become an architect who designs skyscrapers, nor have I penned the next Andromeda Strain. But I did become an Architect…just a Software Architect, and I have published a book…just about Multi-Cloud Architecture and Infrastructure-as-Code. So maybe I didn’t completely fail after all — just took a slightly different path.

Recently, I crossed off another line from my list of childhood ambitions: I became a published NuGet package author.

Why Blue Sky? Why Now?

Most folks know me for my Terraform content or Azure architecture work. But this time, I stepped outside the infrastructure world to explore something that’s part social experiment, part technical curiosity: BlueSky, a distributed, democratic take on social media built on the AT Protocol.

Blue Sky offers something rare — an open protocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol, to be specific) that allows anyone to build tools, clients, and integrations. And yet, when I looked around, I couldn’t find a .NET SDK for it. That was my window.

No SDK? Great! I’ll write one. And I’ll finally publish a NuGet package in the process.

The Architecture Behind the Butterfly

Under the hood, Blue Sky is just one implementation of the AT Protocol stack, composed of three parts:

• DID (Decentralized Identity): For identity resolution.
• PDS (Personal Data Store): Where user data is housed.
• Aggregator: A feed aggregator that pulls data from multiple PDS sources.

When you sign up for Blue Sky, you’re using their PDS, aggregator, and DID provider. But the magic is that you don’t have to. You can self-host these components and connect into the network. It’s as close to decentralized as you can get without diving headfirst into the blockchain world.