Update for the week ending on Friday, Jan 14, 2022

TinyPilot

Started the handoff process with my two EE vendors of transitioning from the previous vendor to the new vendor
1:1 with local staff member
1:1 with developer
Continued getting the wrinkles ironed out on Gusto

Published TinyPilot Pro 2.3.2 release
Led January dev meeting
Weighed in on a few style / architecture decisions
Reviewed early work on adding H264 support for video streaming
Reviewed changes to add Voyager 2 PoE as an option on the TinyPilot sales site
Migrated from CodeTree to Github Projects Beta
- I’d really like to support a niche indie site, but CodeTree seems to be effectively unmaintained at this point

Updated customer instructions now that TinyPilot ships with SSH disabled by default

Fixed the email signup form.
- It turns out that I accidentally broke it back in November when I migrated a bunch of services away from GCP
- I forgot that the email signup form relied on a GCP cloud function

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.

Organized emails into threads
- This is surprisingly hard! And I’m cheating a lot to make it easier, too.
Added the ability to view message contents (as opposed to just a list of emails)
Added the ability to classify emails into categories: recruiter spam, backlink spam, or guest post spam
- I’m using ultra-sophisticated regex-based machine learning
Added CSP headers
Discovered I love Web 1.0
- I’ve always designed web apps where the backend is REST APIs that respond with JSON and the frontend is some JS-based framework (Angular, Vue, or sometimes pure JS)
- This is the first project where I’m skipping JS and just letting the backend render pages.
- It’s great! Why did we ever stop doing this?
- With a JSON API, there’s so much gruntwork of taking server-side objects, deciding which properties to send to the client, encoding them, decoding them at the client, then rendering on screen.
- With server-side rendering, you just stick the data in a template, render it, and call it a day.
- So between no JS and doing most data management in SQL, I’m ready to get a job as a webmaster for a 1998-era startup.

My interview on the Software Misadventures podcast came out.
Started planning the next Indie Hackers Western Mass virtual meetup
Continued scanning some of my old schoolwork that’s been sitting in a storage tub for 30 years