Update for the week ending on Friday, Oct 15, 2021

TinyPilot

Management

• Began reaching out to marketing agencies
• 1:1 with local staff member
• Scheduled a virtual chat with another Pi company founder

Software development

• Cut a release of 2.3.1beta1 for internal testing
• Contributed a doc fix to uStreamer
• Discovered another bad Gridsome bug on the TinyPilot website and reviewed the fix
• Investigated paths out of the two dead frameworks powering the TinyPilot website (Gridsome and BootstrapVue)
  • Hard to find a decent path out!
  • I want to find a way to generate static pages out of Markdown but also write encapsulated HTML components
  • Results in brief
    • Nuxt: Nuxt2 has the same issues as Gridsome, Nuxt3 is still in beta and won’t even support Markdown until they start a rewrite for nuxt/content
      • Sidenote: I submitted a fix to their beta release announcement, and they accepted it quickly.
    • VuePress: Too optimized for developer docs
    • VitePress: Seems even more narrowly scoped, not yet out of alpha.
    • Gatsby: Probably the best support and ecosystem of any option, but I don’t really want to learn React and rewrite all my Vue code.
    • Hugo: Templating syntax is not so fun, doesn’t encapsulate HTML components.
    • Jekyll: Same problem with encapsulating HTML components, though it’s widely supported and stable.
    • 11ty: Same problem with encapsulation HTML components (I think?), and it’s maintained by a single person who could abandon it at any time

Customer support

• Finished writing documentation for how TinyPilot customer support works
• Added local staff members to TinyPilot’s shared inbox so that they can begin answering customer support emails

Product research

• Started writing requirements doc for TinyPilot Voyager 3
• Tested new case for TinyPilot Voyager 2

Sales

• Published a preview of TinyPilot Cloud
• Met with EU distributor

Go Programming Blueprints by Mat Ryer

• Started reading this book.
• Mixed feelings so far.
• I really like Ryer’s blog posts about Go, but the book has been hit or miss.
  • Two blog of his blog posts I like:
    • “How I write HTTP services after eight years”
    • “Code: Align the happy path to the left edge”
• There are some egregious errors, which have gone unfixed despite users reporting them or offering fixes..
• Some of the patterns I find silly.
• Some of the patterns I find clever and help me understand Go features.

WanderJest

• Fixed a bug in event importing
• Added code coverage to the build
• Improved some tests based on code coverage metrics
• Consolidated some Go source files

What Got Done

• Added Go code coverage to the build
• Used code coverage to identify some gaps in my testing

LogPaste

• Updated to LiteStream 0.3.6
  • This release is supposed to reduce the number of LIST requests to S3
  • I’m curious to see what effect this has on TinyPilot’s LogPaste instance, which was making ~47k PUT, COPY, POST, and LIST requests per month

mtlynch.io

• Published my notes for Badass by Kathy Sierra

Misc

• Appeared as a guest on a podcast
• Scheduled a meetup for founders in Western Mass
• Attended Julia Evans’ AMA via Blogging for Devs community
• Added a replica of my restic backup in Japan after this tweet scared me into fearing solar storms
  • Although Practical Doomsday argues that a solar storm wouldn’t be that big of a deal because we’re monitoring for it and can shut down systems in time.
• Saw Paula Poundstone perform
• Fixed some of fly.io’s documentation