Update for the week ending on Friday, Apr 30, 2021

TinyPilot

New office

• Signed a lease for TinyPilot’s first office space!
  • I can move in tomorrow
• Got insurance for the office space
  • Required in the lease
• Ordered networking equipment for the new office

Management

• Continued working on new hire documentation explaining how to pack orders
• Completed Worker’s Comp insurance
  • Pretty annoying process, I don’t recommend JustWorks

Software development

• Began testing the next TinyPilot release candidate
• Reviewed PRs to complete the virtual storage feature
• Automated more of our inventory spreadsheet
• Reviewed a PR to make the video reviews section of the website look prettier
  • Before
  • After
• Reviewed a PR to add the mailing list back to the footer of the sales site
  • We had to remove it because it was causing Vue runtime errors
• Continued trying to get Sentry releases working on the sales site
• Added support for the --brightness flag in ansible-role-ustreamer

Product research

• Experimented with the idea of TinyPilot Cloud Portal
  • It would be a SaaS that gives users remote access to their TinyPilot with minimal setup/configuration

Sales

• Published a blog post about using TinyPilot to control a DSLR
• Updated the website homepage title so that it looks pretty in Google results
  • Before, it was the underwhelming “TinyPilot: Overview”

Misc

• Configured a new test machine
• Ordered an additional test machine

mtlynch.io

• Published “How Litestream Eliminated My Database Server for $0.03/month”

Refactoring English

• Created a first draft of my table of contents
• Started working on a survey to ask readers if it matches what they want the book to teach them
• Worked on automation to build the book with pandoc and export the table of contents as HTML

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.

• Updated LogPaste to take advantage of new features in Litestream v0.3.4
• Accepted a PR that fixed a DoS vulnerability

What Got Done

• Continued working with @michaelcampbell on improvements to the site UI.

Misc

• Got my first COVID vaccine dose
• Completed my taxes
• Gave blog feedback to a student who had taken Hit the Front Page of Hacker News
• Experimented with a new S3 storage provider
• Fixed a bug in Portfolio Rebalancer