HomeUpdate for the week ending on
Friday, Aug 6, 2021
Management
- Continued working out process with EU distributor
- Investigated some hiccups with customs on the first shipment to our distributor
Software development
- Wrote a Go cloud function for TinyPilot’s EmailOctopus mailing list signup
- I like EmailOctopus, but for whatever reason, they don’t offer a signup form HTML snippet that’s easy to style
- I wrote my own REST API for signing up for the TinyPilot mailing list, using EmailOctopus’ API
- I wrote a similar one for my blog, but the new one is prettier because it’s in elegant Go instead of disgusting Node
- Experimented with playwright as a browser automation tool
- The good
- It is satisfyingly fast
- It seems to run parallel tests by default
- The bad
- Documentation frequently omits important information
- I couldn’t figure out how to use their official Docker images
- Video recording seemed to randomly work and not work
- Doesn’t seem to take screenshots on failure, which made me appreciate the value of that feature in Cypress
- Investigated why TinyPilots ship with a New York timezone
- It turns out that the images inherit the timezone from the build machine, which is in my home in MA
- The next version will fix this accidentally because we just switched to cloud build servers in the UK
Customer support
Product research
- Met with electrical engineers to discuss next generation hardware
- Met with 3D print designer to discuss next generation case
- Set up a call with a customer to discuss product direction
Sales
- Pitched myself as a guest two podcast
- One said yes, other hasn’t responded
- Reviewed a redesign of the sales site footer
- Paid affiliate commissions
- Published my July 2021 retrospective
- Started writing a book report for How to Stop Worrying and Start Living by Dale Carnegie
- Started writing a chapter on the rules of writing software tutorials
- Continued the process of migrating to Mediavine for display ads
Home maintenance
- Got my gutters cleaned out
- Got an asbestos abatement company to remove 3 siding panels that were starting to crack
- Started the edit process on the next podcast episode
- Scheduled recording time for next episode (Parenthood)
- Bought a Zoom H1N portable recorder as a backup recording device.
- I have a nicer recording setup, but I always worry about what would happen if the recording got screwed up.
Misc
- Upgraded my primary disk from a 512 GB SSD to a new 2 TB SSD
- Repaved my desktop with a clean install of Win10
- I decided the new disk was a good opportunity to reinstall my OS, since it had accumulated lots of cruft over the years
- This was smoother than I expected. In a day, I was able to get about 90% of my regular apps reinstalled and configured how I want.
- Switched back to my own Cypress Docker images
- The official versions have gotten enormous (>1 GB), and about 40% of that is unnecessary.
- Switching to my own build seems to cut about 30-45 seconds out of each of my CI builds.
- Submitted a build trimming PR to the official Cypress Docker repo
- Got a haircut
- Started watching The White Lotus
- I’m on episode two and loving it so far
