Update for the week ending on Friday, Dec 6, 2019

Zestful

• Closed a sale on an Enterprise plan for Zestful
• Completely rewrote the sales site
  • Used to be Angular, which I hated working with and prevented me from populating per-page HTML tags server-side (necessary for SEO)
  • Now, it’s a Vue + Nuxt pre-rendered site
  • This change alone seems to have bumped it from deep in Google results to the first page
  • Also, took the opportunity to clean up the UI a little bit
  • It’s not a complete port, as I’m still missing a few minor features that existed on the Angular version
  • It’s astonishing how much less code it is. I haven’t measured precisely, but the Vue implementation seems to be about 20% of the code of the Angular version (excluding package-lock.json).
• Trained a new machine learning model that improves accuracy
• Added more USDA matches
• Extended pre-processing logic to strip more meaningless phrases before sending ingredients to the machine learning classifier
• Added additional testing for ingredients with unusual disjunctions
• Labeled 278 new ingredients

New project research

• Conducted customer interviews with two machine shops
• Emailed an auto parts supplier to talk about improving their software (no response yet)

Is It Keto

• Reviewed and published two new articles:
  • Red Bull Sugar Free
  • Red Bull Total Zero
• Added logic to display recent articles on the homepage dynamically
  • Previously, I was just hackily hardcoding it
• Responded to an email from a reader

mtlynch.io

• Published my November retrospective
• Created a skeleton Vue + Nuxt pre-rendered app
  • There aren’t any good resources explaining how to set this up, so I’m going to write a blog post about it
• Fixed handling of zero-valued stats in my stat table generator (#6, #7)

What Got Done

• Quietly added a new feature: updates by project (#373)
  • Example: All of my What Got Done updates
  • I still need to do some work to make this feature discoverable

Python 3 Application Template

This is a template project from which I derive all of my Python CLI apps. I need to write a blog post about this, because I think it could be useful to other people.

• Fixed the *.pyc cleanup command to not mess with virtualenv directory (#25)
• Added dependabot (#31)
  • And merged my first dependabot (PR #30)
• Upgraded to the latest version of DocStringChecker (#32)
• Updated .gitignore (#26)

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.

• Added an end-to-end test for the publish-to-mediagoblin script
• Removed a hardcoded path

Misc

• Reviewed a documentation fix on my Docker Firestore Emulator image
• Updated my project setup documentation to include notes for setting up a new Firebase hosting project.
• Discovered some old footage from my college comedy group that I never published.
  • Edited it and shared it with some members of the group.

Home Maintenance

• Continued my war on mice.
  • Snap traps weren’t working in my attic, so I switched to an electric trap, which is catching mice.

Dusty VCR Podcast

• Created a short trailer to exchange with other podcasts to help find new listeners