Update for the week ending on Friday, Dec 17, 2021

TinyPilot

Sales

• Debuted TinyPilot’s new logo
  • Before
  • After
• Bumped the Voyager 2 price up $10 to $389
  • We were selling faster than we could make them, so this was an attempt to balance it out.
  • Sales have dropped by ~80% since the change, but it’s too early to tell and potentially just a side-effect of holiday slowdown.

Management

• Added a 401(k) plan for TinyPilot’s fulfillment staff.
• Coordinated with EU distributor about starting to sell Voyager 2.
• Continued migrating to Gusto
• 1:1 with local staff member
• Sync with EE partner about Voyager 2 production
• Did monthly bookkeeping
• Wrote internal guidelines for how TinyPilot handles employee vacations.
  • Clarifying that people are expected to stay away from work email on vacation.
• Arranged holiday gifts for local staff.
• Issued 1099s to TinyPilot vendors.
• Paid TinyPilot’s MA sales tax
  • And added a quarterly reminder so I stop forgetting to pay sales tax.
• Sent affiliate payments for December.

Software development

• Added TinyPilot logo to the web app
  • Before
  • After
• Shuffled things around so that we can publish our next release in early January.
  • The PoE Voyager 2 will be ready in early January, and I want it to ship with software that has the new logo.
• Fixed a bug in TinyPilot’s license check for re-downloading microSD images.
  • I forgot to enable TinyPilot Pro backup image downloads for Voyager 2 customers, so I fixed that.
  • Then I had the bright idea to simplify how we were storing product IDs, and I broke everything for about an hour.
  • Fortunately, it’s a low-traffic service, so I don’t think anyone was impacted.
• Fixed a bug in the TinyPilot ansible role that can fail an update if the user has upgraded their kernel since the last reboot.
• Reviewed a PR that disables SSH by default in TinyPilot microSD images.
• Fixed a horizontal scrolling bug on TinyPilot blog on small viewports.

Customer support

• Wrote internal guidelines for how to handle refund or replacement requests.

Product research

• Met with EE firms about next iteration of TinyPilot’s hardware
• Made small adjustment to Voyager 2 case to facilitate assembly.

mtlynch.io

• Got 90% of the way through building a homelab NAS server.
  • I’m planning to do a writeup about it in early 2022.
  • There’s a steep learning curve to TrueNAS, but I’m learning to appreciate its charm.
  • Submitted a PR to TrueNAS to fix outdated links
  • Photos
    • Parts
    • Mostly completed build
    • Me, on first successful boot (after many build issues)
    • Dashboard

What Got Done

• Switched fly.io deployment to build with --local-only
  • Apparently fly.io’s remote build is flaky in CI environments.
• Added docker layer caching to CircleCI build.
  • I feel like I tried this once before and it didn’t do anything, but now it seems like it’s a huge speedup from a one-line change.
  • I need to experiment a bit more.

Zestful

• Responded to an inbound customer inquiry.
• Set up a temporary server for University students who want to use Zestful for an open-source project.
• Added internal instructions for deploying to fly.io
  • I previously always deployed instances to Heroku, but now fly.io is my platform of choice for Docker-based web services.

Lenny

Lenny is an experimental email chatbot I’m making to correspond with spammy, templated requests I receive about linking to random pages on my blog.

• Added a datastore to persist emails.
• Integrated Litestream to persist the database to the cloud.
• Started to implement a web UI for displaying received emails.
  • I’m going to try doing it in pure Go templates and JavaScript. I’m a little tired of Vue and frontend frameworks at the moment.
• Added unit tests for postmark API handler

Misc

• Upgraded my VM server with +64 GB of RAM and + 2 TB of SSD
  • 48 CPU cores
  • 3 TB SSD
  • 128 GB RAM
  • Moved some of my VMs over to the new disk and resized them to use 80 GB LVM volumes
  • Changed the default VM size to 80 GB LVM volume (previous was 40 GB)
  • Figured out how to resize a Proxmox Ubuntu LVM disk
• Added bash aliases for going back to the previous branch in git:

## Go back a branch
alias gbb='git checkout $(git branch --sort=-committerdate | grep -v "^\* " | sed -n "1 p")'

## Go back two branches ago
alias gbbb='git checkout $(git branch --sort=-committerdate | grep -v "^\* " | sed -n "2 p")'