Update for the week ending on Friday, Feb 5, 2021

TinyPilot

Reviewed a design doc for a potential new version of TinyPilot
Investigated why an in-development “update via web UI” feature wasn’t working
- It’s a funny root cause.
- I know the real way to do long-running background tasks in Flask is to run celery or some sort of background job manager.
- But I didn’t want to do something so heavyweight, so I just did a hacky thing and started a background process and used a global variable to track completion.
- But part of the update process involves restarting the TinyPilot server web app. When the web app restarts, it obviously loses the global variable…
- I think the fix is to track state in a file so that I don’t rely on a global that persists in memory.
- Started working on a fix, but the service restarting still kills the child process, so I have to figure out how to let the child process keep running regardless of what happens to the parent.
Tweaked my internal script for testing power connectors
- Getting Python to play a sound is surprisingly complicated
Reviewed a PR to the update mechanism in TinyPilot Pro
Reviewed a change to the Voyager case design to prevent the fan wire from rubbing up against the fan
Fixed a bug in TinyPilot Pro where it was incorrectly rejecting usernames for having uppercase letters
Fixed a break in my uStreamer Ansible role
Made it easier to configure custom EDID settings in the Ansible role
Fixed dead links on my parts list
Submitted a couple small documentation fixes to ustreamer

Published “My Third Year as a Solo Developer”
- It’s the first time one of my articles has been really popular on Twitter. I think adding a tweet at the bottom of the article helped. ~900 new people started following me this week.
Published my January retrospective
Updated my stat-calculating script to include stats for Hit the Front Page of Hacker News
Investigated moving from Disqus to talkyard
- I was inspired by this article I saw on HN: Disqus, the dark commenting system
- Talkyard looks neat. It’s open source, but you can pay the maintainer to host your instance.
- Looks nice, privacy friendly.
- I might also use it to make a support forum for TinyPilot
Added a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license to all my blog content
- Now anyone can reshare my articles with attribution
Created cover image spec for my next article

Added support for passing through discount codes from my landing page to Gumroad
- Dummy example: https://hitthefrontpage.com/?offer_code=dummyexample&discount_pct=20
- It updates the UI to reflect the discount and passes the code through to Gumroad
- The discount_pct in the URL just affects the UI, not the actual discount applied.
Lowered prices to see how that affects sales
- Doesn’t seem to have any noticeable effect

Put up a landing page and began collecting emails from interested customers
- 88 signups so far!

Sold most of my beekeeping equipment to a new beekeeper
- So much freed up space!
I still have one over-wintered hive and minimal equipment to tend to it, but I’m going to move it to the buyer’s location in spring.

Requested a text interview on Indie Hackers
Cleaned up the Ethernet cable wiring in my office
- I was messily running an Ethernet cable across the floor for testing TinyPilots. Now, they have a dedicated switch.
Investigated a Spanish language Is It Keto copycat