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

TinyPilot

Management

• Continued working on distribution agreement with EU distributor
• 1:1 with developer
• Revised instructions for flagging late incoming orders with our new inventory system
• Paid an annoying $4 UPS bill
  • Took me 20 minutes to figure out how to even pay it
  • I’m pretty sure they sent it to me by mistake since I never use UPS, but fighting it would cost way more than $4

Software development

• Published a new release
• Researched Pi server hosting options
  • I’ve been looking for this for a year and finally found two providers this week
  • IKoula
    • A little hard to get up and running
    • Fast customer support
    • Ostensibly has English support, but you end up seeing a lot of French language
  • Mythic Beasts
    • Easy to get up and running
    • Responsive customer support
    • Pretty good REST API
    • Super affordable pricing
• Migrated our TinyPilot image building process to Mythic Beasts
  • I’d been doing it on a little Pi + SSD in the corner of my office and some hacked together scripts
  • Cleaned up the scripts a bit and made them reproducible by any other developer on the team
• Reviewed PR to improve button style in web UI
  • Before
  • After
• Reviewed PRs to fix redundant file re-downloading issue
• Had TinyPilot’s first PR where I wasn’t the reviewer
  • Before this, I’ve always reviewed 100% of PRs, but this was becoming impractical.
  • We’re switching to a system where everything still goes through code review, but devs can review each other’s work
  • We intended to do this earlier, but it was hard because the developers work part-time at different hours, so they’d have to wait for a review from each other, whereas I’m usually available to review within hours.
  • So new system is that PRs go to me if they’re urgent or affect UI, others get reviewed by other devs
• Reviewed PR to add an “Add to Cart” button to products on the sales site from the product index
• Reviewed a PR that adds a quantity adjust option to the checkout cart
• Reviewed a PR that fixed an issue with images in the checkout cart on the website

Product research

• Continued working with EE and 3D printing vendors on Voyager 2 design
• Met with EE consultant about future projects

Sales

• Reviewed design overhaul to TinyPilot sales site

WanderJest

• Added auto-cropping for headshot images based on face detection, but it’s never quite accurate enough
  • I’m going to switch to something like cropper.js to let the user choose the crop, maybe starting with face detection
• Added cache busting to image paths so I can use sensible HTTP cache headers on images
• Used goroutines to parallelize image uploads
• Fixed 404s to return real 404s instead of just an HTTP 200 and a “Not found” error on screen
• Added more rigorous user input checking for performer fields

Is It Keto

• Applied to MediaVine
  • Supposedly, the payout is way bigger than AdSense, so it’s worth trying.
  • Hopefully, it doesn’t require a ton of work to transition.
  • Last year, I tried to switch to AdThrive and it was such a time-suck that I gave up.

Misc

• Bought a new SSD for my main desktop
  • Realized that I built it 6 years ago and haven’t upgraded anything since
  • I’m not really hitting the limits of RAM or CPU, but it felt like a lot of things are sluggish
  • I realized it’s because I have a small local SSD and keep most of my data on a NAS, but I could speed it up by keeping more on my local SSD
  • Got the Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB
  • I’m upgrading from a Samsung SM951 512 GB, so it should be a:
    • 3.5x speedup in sequential read speed
    • 8.3x speedup in sequential write speed
  • Should arrive next week, so I’m also going to clean install Windows, since it’s been a while and I’ve accrued lots of clutter