Update for the week ending on Friday, Apr 2, 2021
TinyPilot
Management
- Made my first local hire for TinyPilot
- Visited potential office space for TinyPilot
- 15-minute walk from my house and only $550/month, including utilities and furniture
- Main office view
- Side view
- Did bookkeeping for March
Software development
- Integrated my TinyPilot shopify webhooks listener into my inventory system
- Now any time someone buys a product, the parts for that product are automatically decremented from my inventory (previously this was a manual process)
- Added unit tests to my shopify webhook listener
- Added more rigorous parsing to the shopify webhook listener
- Reviewed a PR to make install parameters more robust
- Migrated the TinyPilot Logpaste server from Heroku to fly.io
- I fell in love with fly.io at first, but then noticed some warts, including the fact that
you can’t deploy a specific tag of an image, only its latest version- Edit: fly.io reached out to me, and it turns out lack of tagged releases was a bug, which is now fixed.
- I fell in love with fly.io at first, but then noticed some warts, including the fact that
- Migrated the TinyPilot LogPaste server from fly.io to Amazon Lightsail
- LightSail is kind of big and clunky, but it gives me the most control over what I deploy. It costs $7/mo, which is the same as I was paying on Heroku.
- Updated uStreamer dependency to v3.23
- Disabled hot reloading on file changes
- It was convenient for development, but it’s too confusing having that behavior in production
- Fixed a js.map filename to get rid of a distracting browser warning
Customer support
- Normal answering of customer support emails, but didn’t add any FAQ articles
Product research
- Continued iterating on design for TinyPilot PoE HAT
Sales
- Invited three more YouTubers to join TinyPilot affiliate program
- Met with another YouTuber about niche sponsored content for TinyPilot
mtlynch.io
- Wrote most of my March retrospective, but haven’t published it yet
- Continued working on my blog post about LogPaste
- Shared a draft with Blogging for Devs and got useful feedback.
LogPaste
Meta: I needed a service where users could easily share TinyPilot debug logs with me, and nothing else matched what I was looking for, so I rolled my own as a fun weekend project.
- Added instructions for deploying on fly.io
- Moved auto-deployment of the demo instance to fly.io
- It was previously on Heroku, but fly.io provides an HTTPS certificate for free, whereas Heroku charges $7/month
resticpy
Meta: I started making Python bindings for Restic, and I’ve gotten a little carried away.
- Added a CircleCI job to publish to PyPI when I tag a new Github release
- Refactored exception classes so that clients can access them
- Added support for copy and snapshots commands
Is It Keto
- Jumped through a bunch of hoops for Amazon because they suddenly want proof that my site is legitimate
- As always, their requests for information are imprecise and confusing
Misc
- Met with FORGE to give feedback about one of their upcoming programs
- Met with another founder who wanted to discuss their idea with me