Update for the week ending on Friday, Apr 23, 2021

TinyPilot

Management

• Reviewed the office lease with a lawyer and sent proposed changes to landlord
  • I felt like a real businessperson!
• Continued working on documentation for the new assistant
• Reviewed a ramp-up timeline my inventory manager created for the new assistant
• Continued setting up JustWorks
• Created a contingency plan for what looks like an exhaustion of 2 GB Pi 4B availability

Software development

• Reviewed PRs to add UI controls to adjust video streaming settings
  • Previously the process of changing streaming settings was very slow and clunky, but now you can do it fast from the UI
• Reviewed PRs that add disk image uploading functionality to TinyPilot Pro
• Changed the update logic to eliminate a race condition
• Continued refactoring and adding more tests to the update logic
• Started planning for next TinyPilot milestone
• Did a bunch of boring merge commits to sync TinyPilot Pro repos with the community edition
• Fixed a bug in my TinyPilot shopify webhook endpoint
  • I’m probably not going to bother with Google Cloud Functions in the future, because they create lots of little headaches, and the savings is not worth it over just running a small server 24/7
• Experimented more with TinyPilot cloud portal

Product research

• Met with EE folks to discuss strategies for overcoming component shortage

Sales

• Talked with customer who wants custom TinyPilot case for a bulk order
• Pitched TinyPilot to a self-hosting podcast
• Continued working on an experimental version of TinyPilot to control DSLR cameras

Misc

• Set up an OPNSense router for the new office, using only TinyPilot
• Set up a new TinyPilot test machine
• Added support for image flashing on the TinyPilot test machines

Refactoring English

• Started actually writing my book
• Got as far as an outline
  • Still progress!

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on blog post about LogPaste
• Added whitespace checks
• Fixed broken links
• Tried adding htmltest to my build, but realize it doesn’t support the <base> tag yet, so it thinks all my relative links are broken.

What Got Done

• Reviewed @michaelcampbell’s PR to improve the What Got Done UI
• Added buildkit to the docker build for integration tests
  • How have I never heard of this before?
  • It creates nicer docker build output and parallelizes build steps

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.

• Started updating code to take advantage of upcoming features in 0.3.4

Misc

• Presented to my peer mentorship group about my efforts to systematize TinyPilot
• Scheduled my first COVID vaccine dose (this weekend)
• Reviewed tax returns from my accountant
• Made oreo butter
  • It’s pretty good.
  • You just blend together coconut oil and oreos and it’s liquidy at first, then it solidifies to a tasty butter-like consistency
• Started sponsoring PhotoPrism
  • It’s an open source version of Google Photos
  • It’s not quite to the point where I can use it as a real replacement for Google Photos, but it’s pretty impressive.