Update for the week ending on Friday, Nov 22, 2019

New project research

• Met with a metal shop about potentially automating some of their manual workflows
• Researched existing metal shop software (it’s almost all horrendous)
• Scouted other metal shops in the area to contact next week
• Started making a dummy, proof-of-concept product

Is It Keto

• Had a monthly meeting with the site’s writer
• Edited and published a new article:
  • Red Bull
• Edited another article that’s not yet ready to publish
• Fixed my AdSense ads, which I accidentally broke through my tinkering last week
• Experimented with removing price from meal plan pages
  • Doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, people don’t click the button to download them
• Fixed fuzzy name matching for “mango”, “mangos”, and “mangoes” (and foods that match a similar pattern)

mtlynch.io

• Started writing about home video digitization project
• Fixed a break in my deployment configuration (#472)

What Got Done

• Added prettier to my CI build and VS Code configuration to enforce consistent JavaScript formatting throughout my repo (#372)
  • Hat tip to Gleb Bahmutov’s easy-to-follow guide: “How to configure Prettier and VSCode”
• Submitted What Got Done to /r/bujo and /r/bulletjournal

Zestful

• Responded to an inquiry from a Zestful customer

Misc

• Hosted the November Indie Hackers Western Mass meetup with dtq.
• Attended RVI’s monthly angel investor meeting.
• Met a local designer for lunch.
• Submitted another talk proposal for PyCon 2020
• Attended a cryptocurrency meetup.
• Wrote rough instructions for the process of creating a new Go AppEngine app
  • I forget the little gotchas every time
• Responded to an mtlynch.io reader’s request for advice about hiring freelancers
• Purchased tickets for MicroConf Starter Edition

Home Video Digitization

Last year, I digitized about 40 hours of my family’s old home videos and put them on a private media server for my family. I’m in the process of cleaning up my tools so I can publish a guide about this.

• Published my scripts for processing home videos
• Added an e2e test for render_scenes.py, the script that chops large videos into sets of clips (#9)
• Started an e2e test for publish_to_mediagoblin.py, the script that programmatically adds clips to MediaGoblin (#11)
  • I’m stuck on some weird Docker permissions issues
• Refactored out the last few bits that had my personal information baked into the source code:
  • Refactored the logic for calculating everyone’s ages / age ranges based on video dates and added unit tests
  • Refactored configuration options into a configuration file
• Created a Github repository for free usage videos
  • I need a public domain / Creative Commons video for my e2e tests, and this was the best way I could think of to host it at a permanent, reliable URL for free

Beekeeping

• Put the honey supers back on the hives to help bees have enough food storage until winter
  • I took them off to treat the hives for mites, but honey supers can’t be there while oxalic acid is in the hives