Update for the week ending on Friday, Aug 7, 2020

TinyPilot

• Cleared the order backlog!
• Initiated conversations with design companies about a cleaner design for TinyPilot.
• Reviewed a user-submitted PR to add clipboard paste functionality
• Answered customer support questions from new users.
  • Updated the blog post and installation instructions to try to prevent users from repeating mistakes.
• Set up eBay listings for non-US customers.
  • This was surprisingly hard!
  • I haven’t created a new eBay account since I was 13 (shhh, don’t tell eBay I had my personal account since age 13), so I didn’t realize the hoops you have to jump through now.
  • I had to go through manual verification and they’ve capped me to $1,000 in sales per month.
  • But now these listings are up:
    • Hobbyist kit
    • Hacker kit
• Tweaked my assembly instructions to add clearer photos and more clarification about how to know things are working.
• Adjusted the color on the sales site logo
  • Before
  • After
• Did some work to get TinyPilot closer to working on non Raspberry Pi OS systems.
• Fixed a UI bug in the web app.
• Added video demo to website.
• Added Twitter link to website.

Is It Keto

• Finally collected the money that a merchant was refusing to pay me.
  • Blog post to come.
• Began experimenting with a new affiliate.
• Applied and got approved for AdThrive, the fancy ad network that supposedly pays out substantially more than AdSense.
  • I’ve seen reports that it’s 2-8x the revenue, which would be huge for Is It Keto, but I’ll wait to see what happens.

mtlynch.io

• Published my July retrospective.
• Added my notes for The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
• Updated my stat aggregator to pull in TinyPilot stats and overall stats.
  • I had to add support for thousands separators for dollar amounts, which is a nice milestone (it was previously so rare for me to have revenue figures >$1k that I never noticed this bug).

What Got Done

• Worked with UserKit to chase down a UserKit dummy-mode bug.

Gridsome

In an effort to help Gridsome improve dev velocity, I’ve been volunteering a few hours a week to help manage their documentation.

• Reviewed two minor PRs.

Beekeeping

• Bottled the remaining honey and cleaned up all the honey extracting equipment.

Misc

• Attended the Indie Hackers Western Mass virtual meetup
• Played with Cory Zue’s new code review analytics tool and gave him feedback about my first impressions.
  • He’s looking for volunteers if you’re into code metrics.