Update for the week ending on Friday, Oct 2, 2020
TinyPilot
- Finally caught up with orders
- I was backordered on one or more products for almost all of September, but now I have ~40 of the power connectors, the hardest component to restock because it’s custom-made.
- Wrote a blog post showcasing the new features in TinyPilot v1.1.
- Fixed a break in my Ansible role
- I couldn’t figure out how the role suddenly broke out from under me because I thought I was explicitly declaring versions of all my dependencies.
- It turned out that the Docker image I was using was auto-upgrading to the latest version of Ansible, so I forked it and made my own.
- But that didn’t fix the issue…
- The answer was that if you
pip install moleculebefore youpip install ansible, molecule automatically installs the latest version of Ansible. - So I just switched the order of my pip installs to ensure that Ansible came first.
- Added version printing to hopefully make this issue more obvious in the future.
- Fixed a break in my TinyPilot image building scripts.
- Fixed feature blurbs on the homepage
- Spent the day driving out to the manufacturer to pick up boards for the TinyPilot Power Connectors
- There were shipping issues that would have delayed delivery until days after they were due out to my customers, so I figured I’d just drive out myself.
- Adjusted the way the remote screen occupies browser window real estate as the window size gets smaller.
- Resumed work on new TinyPilot case.
- Did a customer interview with an MSP.
- Reviewed inventory processes with my assistant.
- Spoke to several different customers about their orders and feature requests.
- Reached out to 7 IT consultants/MSPs requesting customer interviews.
mtlynch.io
- Got about 60% done with my September retrospective.
- Wrote spec for some of the illustrations of my upcoming code review article.
- Continued working on code review article.
What Got Done
- Resumed work on a WYSIWYG editor for weekly updates.
- I started this back in April but got discouraged when I ran into testability issues with Cypress.
- I tried testing it again with the latest version of Cypress and the testability issues have magically been solved by Cypress updates in the meantime!
- Upgraded Cypress to 5.2.0
- Updated the instructions for setting up test data
- It’s been ~6 months since I had to do it and I had forgotten.
- Updated Go dependencies
- Added depenabot to update dependencies automatically
- Not sure that I configured it right, since it hasn’t done anything.
Gridsome
In an effort to help Gridsome improve dev velocity, I’ve been volunteering a few hours a week to help manage their documentation.
- Closed two spam #hacktoberfest PRs
Beekeeping
- Continued treatment for varroa mites.
- Refilled bees’ feeders with diluted honey so they can fill their brood boxes with enough food stores for winter.
Misc
- Went crazy trying to figure out what’s wrong with my home network
- I originally thought it was my Proxmox server, but now I’m leaning toward an issue with my router.
- Worked on bookkeeping.
- Especially untangling TinyPilot from my other business, since it’s now an LLC and needs its own books.
- Switched my backup solution from Cloudberry to restic.
- The backup solution I always want is just a client-side app that encrypts data and lets me use my own cloud storage provider (S3, GCP, etc.)
- I’ve used Cloudberry for ~10 years, and they’ve always felt like the best of bad options, but they worked well enough.
- A recent HN thread inspired me to review the available options.
- I tried Borg backup, but their documentation didn’t make any sense to me.
- I landed on restic
- I’m a sucker for Go-based projects.
- Their documentation was pretty good.
- Their app is a single binary (thanks, Go!)
- It’s nice in that everything’s scriptable, but it’s hard to figure out which files changed between incremental backups.