Finalized the list of features for next TinyPilot sprint
Migrated to a new inventory system and updated most of our documentation to match
For the first year, I’ve been using a home-grown spreadsheet that’s ever-increasing in complexity
Reviewed an internal to-do list that one of TinyPilot’s staffers made in Notion
Continued making plans with EU TinyPilot distributor
1:1s with two local TinyPilot staff members and one remote developer
Reordered inventory
Software development
Cut a release candidate for the new version of TinyPilot
Began QA testing for the release candidate build
Gave feedback on work to display update logs in the TinyPilot UI
Reviewed a change to bring a mailing list signup form back to the TinyPilot footer
There was a weird Vue bug killing the whole site that seemed related to the mailing list signup, so I cut it two months ago and hadn’t had time to restore it safely.
Reviewed a change that allows the user to make HTTPS optional in TinyPilot Pro
Product research
Met with cloud vendor about possible TinyPilot Cloud collaboration
Continued coordinating with EE firm about Voyager 2
Sales
Reviewed a proposal for a redesign of the TinyPilot sales site
Reached out to a touring comedian to collaborate on promoting his show on WanderJest
Got rid of private GCS bucket
I was storing temporary images in a separate private bucket and only moving them to a public bucket once the user actually published them.
This added a lot of complexity for very little gain (the images are on their way to publication anyway when the user uploads them), so now everything’s in a public bucket, but the temp files have unpredictable, non-enumerable filenames.
Switched images to use media.wanderjest.com URL instead of storage.googleapis.com
Added admin-only UI navigation features
There were already admin-only pages at hidden URLs, but I realized it was adding so much friction to my work having to manually type the URLs as I moved around the app
Overhauled how WanderJest imports event data from other sources
Golang has nice JSON deserialization support, but only if you know the structure of the input field.
I’m importing data that could be in a few different formats, so I’ve added logic that canonicalizes the JSON into the format I’m expecting.
It feels kind of hacky because I have to deserialize to an unstructured map, fix up the data, serialize to JSON, then deserialize into my custom struct, but it’s the best solution I can think of.
Added support for importing data when the price is a string instead of a float
Add webpack logic to hide Go server-side templates when I’m running in Vue dev mode (and the Go server is not pre-rendering the templates)
Exclude past and canceled shows from the sitemap, because it was causing Google to think most of my pages are irrelevant
I’ve been doing all the editing, but it’s pretty time-consuming.
I struggled with how to outsource this because I want to preserve editorial control over what content stays in the show, and it’s hard to explain to someone when to keep a silence or a word stumble because it fits the show and when it’s just extra fluff that they should cut
I created a trial job and hired four different editors to see how they edit a 10-minute segment of unedited tape
The demos seem magical, and I was at first disappointed that I hadn’t been using it all along, but then I tried it and was underwhelmed.
It probably works for podcasts with one or two participants or with very little crosstalk, but it had a hard time identifying crosstalk in my recordings, so I couldn’t rely on the editor to remove words.
Misc
Hosted a peer mentorship meeting for local founders
When I ran it in test mode on a small subset of files, it would always print times correctly like “15.3 seconds”
When I ran it in real mode on my actual data, it would always print times correctly like “5.77782144minutes”
I thought it was somehow caching the pyc file from before I added nice string formatting.
The bug turned out to just be me calling the wrong function in my recursive logic, and the wrong function almost did the right thing. It never showed up in test mode because it had to reach minutes or higher to hit the bug.
