Update for the week ending on Friday, Jun 4, 2021

TinyPilot

Management

• Continued training for newest employee
  • Gave him keys to the office, access to the computer, tweaked documentation.
• Ended a contract with a recent trial hire for frontend development.
  • We got off to too bumpy of a start, and I felt like we just weren’t going to communicate well.
  • One of the issues was that he tried to communicate things to me in commit messages, but I only review code at the level of the pull request, so I didn’t see it.
  • I updated my documentation to make expectations clearer.
• Started a trial hire with another freelance developer
• Sent polite decline letters to other freelance applicants
• Iterated on inventory processes for the new office
• Arranged order of Raspberry Pi boards directly from the manufacturer
  • It’s been hard to find them due to the global chip shortage
• Scheduled TinyPilot sprint planning

Software development

• Updated our inventory spreadsheet to make it easier to track ready-to-ship products (as opposed to unassembled parts)
• Reviewed PRs to allow the user to upload a disk image from a URL
• Reviewed refactoring PR for closing of dialogs
• Reviewed a PR to add a reusable dropdown button
• Moved ansible-role-tinypilot from my personal Github to the tiny-pilot Github org
  • Now the last one I have to move is the core tinypilot repo
• Added a convenience script to fix frontend formatting
• Added better documentation for the TinyPilot website’s end-to-end test after it seemed to trip up the most recent freelancer

Customer support

• Answered questions in support forums
• Highlight
  • A customer reported that their Voyager wasn’t booting.
  • Signs are pointing to a defective Raspberry Pi, even though that would be the first time TinyPilot has ever seen one of our Pis die in the field.
  • I offered to send the customer a return label so we could investigate and replace whatever’s broken.
  • They said they’re going to have one of their IT guys “look at it with an oscilloscope and voltmeter.”
  • Sounds cool, and I’m interested to see what they can find out.

Product research

• Offered advice to one of my developers doing bleeding edge dev work on an integration with a new cloud provider

Sales

• Iterated on the spec for a TinyPilot REST API, aimed at Enterprise customers
  • Reached out to large customers for feedback

Misc

• Installed Proxmox on the office rack server.

mtlynch.io

• Published my May 2021 retrospective
  • Which made it to the front page of Hacker News

WanderJest

• Started tinkering with the code again to get it back up and running now that live comedy shows are coming back.
  • It’s going to remain a weekend hobby project, which makes it a little more fun because I don’t have to care that it isn’t profitable.

Zestful

• Published a PyPI package for Zestful
  • It’s something I wanted to do for a long time, but I didn’t know how. I ended up learning for resticpy, so I figured I may as well do it for this, too.
  • Added Python example to Zestful website
  • I’m curious to see if this helps people discover the API.
• Fixed a bug where the website would give a confusing response when the user ran out of free daily parses or hit any kind of error

Is It Keto

• Removed links to the mailing list
  • I forgot it was there. I’m not using it for anything, so it’s silly to waste people’s time collecting their emails for no reason.
• Moved Propel Fitness Water to the front page
  • It took the place of Beyond Burger, which doesn’t generate much in terms of Amazon Affiliate revenue.

python3_seed

This is my boilerplate Python3 project, which I use as a template for new Python projects.

• Added checks for whitespace conventions
• Removed DocStringChecker
  • This is a useful tool that I’ve tried to use for several years because it enforces Google’s style conventions for docstrings, but it’s so hard to keep it running, so I finally decided it wasn’t earning its keep as a static analysis tool.

WhatGotDone

• Applied parse, don’t validate to journal entry dates
• Rewrote my enable-git-hooks script so that you can run it from anywhere, not just the repo root.

Misc

• Caught up on bookkeeping
• Attended my first post-vaccination social event: a local stand-up comedy show
  • Appropriately, my last pre-pandemic social event was a local standup show.
• Found evidence of carpet beetles in my house
  • My girlfriend has seen a few adult beetles around the house, so we investigated my closet and found a ~1mm hole one had chewed through one of my suits.
  • We bagged up all my suits and they’re pending dry cleaning, put everything else through washer/dryer.