Update for the week ending on Friday, Jan 1, 2021

2020 Year in Review

Inspired by @michaelcampbell. See below for weekly update.

January

• Launched WanderJest, a platform for discovering nearby live comedy shows
  • Attended lots of shows to interview comedians and attendees
  • Made my first affiliate deal with a comedy performance (which earned $0)
• Published “My Second Year as a Solo Developer,” which reached #1 on Hacker News

February

• Announced the WanderJest Comedy Scavenger Hunt for March of 2020 😨
• Wrote my first press release
• Added support for user-managed accounts (I was initially populating all performer profiles)
• Formed an affiliate partnership between WanderJest and a local theater company

March

• Canceled the WanderJest scavenger hunt due to COVID and announced the site was on hiatus, no longer listing live shows
• Panic-bought canned foods
• Launched portfolio rebalancer, a SaaS app to help people rebalance their portfolio by asset class
• Delivered a talk at NERD Summit, “How I Used Python to Steal Money”

April

• Added support for purchasing a paid subscription to Portfolio Rebalancer (nobody ever did)
• Published “Stripe is Silently Recording Your Movements On its Customers’ Websites,” which reached #1 on Hacker News
• Rebooted Is It Keto and migrated it from AppEngine to a static site.

May

• Moved from 100% hand-written articles on Is It Keto to auto-generating articles with templates based on nutritional information and category.
• Found a way to emulate keyboard input from a Raspberry Pi
  • Early precursor to TinyPilot
• Presented a talk to my peer mentorship group called “How to be a Sort of Successful Software Blogger”
  • Early precursor to Hit the Front Page of Hacker News

June

• Tested a sister product to Is It Keto called Cornerstone that was a “keto community platform” (it received very little interest from Is It Keto users)
• Created a pre-order page for a product called KVM Pi (which I’d later rename TinyPilot)
  • 11 people signed up for the mailing list, one person pre-ordered
• Built my new VM server (I published the blog post later)

July

• Published " TinyPilot: Build a KVM Over IP for Under $100"
• My blog post reached #1 on Hacker News and several subreddits
• Sold 52 TinyPilot kits for a total of $8,741, my most successful project launch ever by orders of magnitude.

August

• TinyPilot earns $3k in revenue
• Released TinyPilot v2 kits with less ugly components.
• Paused TinyPilot sales to investigate a power flaw in my original design
• Worked with an electrical engineering consulting firm to make a custom USB splitter to power the TinyPilot safely

September

• TinyPilot earns $3.8k in revenue
• Began shipping TinyPilot internationally
• Added support to TinyPilot for mouse emulation

October

• TinyPilot reaches $10k in monthly revenue
• Interviewed IT professionals about making TinyPilot more useful to them
• Tested new marketing channels for TinyPilot
• Began making slides for my first-ever paid video course, Hit the Front Page of Hacker News

November

• TinyPilot reaches $12k in monthly revenue
• Released TinyPilot Voyager, a premium version of TinyPilot in a custom 3D printed case
• Joined the Blogging for Devs community and started piloting my course with members there

December

• TinyPilot reaches $15k in monthly revenue
• Recorded 2.5 hours of material for Hit the Front Page of Hacker News, sold $1.1k in pre-orders.
• Published the first beta of TinyPilot Pro, the premium version of TinyPilot’s software with extra features.
• Published “How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You”, which reached #1 on /r/programming and became my second most popular reddit post.

Okay, now back to your regularly scheduled weekly update.

TinyPilot

• Released the first beta version of TinyPilot Pro
• Added a digital product checkout flow to the online store
  • Sold seven licenses in the first 24 hours
• Polished TinyPilot Pro’s new UI interfaces
  • Login screen: before vs. after
  • Settings screen: before vs. after
• Allow user to turn off password authentication after enabling it
• Updated install instructions for all TinyPilot products
  • I had the dumb idea to change a label on the TinyPilot power connector case, then changed it back, not thinking about how much work I was creating for myself in taking all new photos and updating instructions for customers.
• Signed up for Notifier for Reddit
  • I keep missing discussions of TinyPilot on reddit, so this might be a good solution
  • It sent me a notification email within 1 min of my test email
  • I also tried F5Bot (free), which worked in 5 mins
  • I’ll probably end up with F5Bot because Notifier doesn’t offer much over the free solution for my use case, and it covers more platforms
• Tested PoE with TinyPilot
  • Doesn’t work
  • Annoyingly, the Pi PoE HAT and the HDMI to CSI bridge clash with each other. There’s a workaround, but it disables the fan on the PoE hat, which is also a problem.
• Added support for listing discounts on the website.
• Created a job posting for a part-time dev position
  • If you’ve read to this point in my What Got Done, and you want this job, please reach out, as you’ll likely have a huge advantage as someone who’s already interested in this work.
  • Published the job application on borderline.biz after seeing it advertised on Hacker News
• Added support for downloading the device’s CA certificate
  • Allows the user to trust a self-signed application certificate
  • As far as I can tell, this is the only way to make a browser trust the certificate of an internal server’s certificate because normal certificate providers can’t sign an internal device’s TLS certificate.
• Added protections to ensure an unauthorized user can’t access the TinyPilot video stream without being logged in
• Added support for signing TLS certificate when the hostname is not tinypilot

Hit the Front Page of Hacker News

• Recorded and published a new section of the course to pre-order customers
• Overhauled my ffmpeg postprocessing script
  • Now it runs on my beefy VM server instead of my dev box
  • It only uses 20% of the server’s CPU power because it encodes one video at a time. I’m resisting the urge to overengineer it into really fast parallel processing.
• Finished sending personalized thank you letters to everyone who provided feedback on test runs of the course
• Found a blogger interested in participating in one of the “deep dives” in the course bonus material

mtlynch.io

• Published book report for How to Be an Antiracist
• Removed all affiliate links from the blog
  • I’m tired of Google search results cluttered with affiliate spam, and I don’t want my blog to be mixed up in it.
• Started my December retrospective

Is It Keto

• Updated dead Amazon affiliate links in preparation for the New Year’s rush of traffic
  • (Despite my self-righteous anti-affiliate link stance in the previous section)

What Got Done

• Thought about how I want to add more features to What Got Done but don’t have the bandwidth.