Update for the week ending on Friday, Jan 21, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

• Led handoff meeting between old and new EE vendors.
• Had 1:1 with local staff member.
• Placed orders for new manufactures to (hopefully) get in before Chinese New Year.
• Started December bookkeeping for TinyPilot
  • Hit a big gotcha in beancount, where it apparently drops transactions silently if it thinks they’re duplicates, even when the dates and transaction amounts differ.
  • Also found a bug in my Mercury’s (business checking) website where the balance on my statements doesn’t match the balance on my dashboard.
• Introduced TinyPilot Book Club
  • Program for TinyPilot to pay for books local fulfillment staff are interested in reading for work.

Software development

• Revised a design document for an overhaul of TinyPilot’s update process.
  • Our current update process is very convoluted and difficult to reason about, so we’re rearchitecting it to be something simpler.
  • The toughest part is roadmapping the transition to the new system without breaking legacy clients.
• Reviewed a PR that fixes a bug in Hobbyist Kit upgrades
• Reviewed a PR to unbundle the power adaptor from the TinyPilot Voyager 2.
  • It’s always created confusion for non-US customers, and when we release the PoE version, it won’t make sense to bundle a power adaptor with every order.
• Added unit test for a REST endpoint I added a year ago.
  • Another change almost silently broke the endpoint (caught during code review), but it would have been better to catch it through unit tests.
• Removed stray   characters from Markdown files on the website and added a build check to prevent them from sneaking back in.
• Reviewed a PR to fix a UI bug on the website.

Customer support

• Clarified instructions on the “Fixing TLS errors” page in response to a customer question.

Product research

• Worked with EE vendors on testing plan for Voyager 2 PoE.

Sales

• Resumed accepting orders.
  • We had to temporarily shut down orders because we ran out of inventory.
• Reviewed a PR that changed the TinyPilot website fonts
  • Before
  • After
  • It looks a little weird right now because it’s the new font on the old site design, but we’ll be incrementally moving to a much better design over the next few weeks.

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on blog post about my 4th year as a bootstrapped founder.

What Got Done

• Started work on a feature to show stats about how many entries a What Got Done users has published in a row.
• Change run-go-tests script to run the quick tests by default
  • It’s easier if quick is the default and --full is what runs in CI because it’s less for me to remember when I run the tests manually.
• Change the dev serve script so that it only populates the local database if one doesn’t already exist
• Change server launch dev script to not print credentials to the console
  • I realized this when I watched the screencast I recorded and realized I leaked my prod credentials. Fortunately, I caught it before releasing the video, so they’re blurred out in the released version.
• Add a convenience script that syncs my dev environment’s datastore to my production datastore.
  • Props to Litestream!
• Fix a bug where repopulating the dev database didn’t always delete the old version.
• Use the server’s public Router() method in unit tests instead of accessing private members.
• Simplify tests to use strings.NewReader instead of converting strings to byte arrays.

Deliberate Programming

Deliberate Programming is an experiment I’m trying where I record myself programming, then record myself reviewing the recording with commentary about how I can improve.

• Released episode 2
• Takeaways
  • When I’m programming in JavaScript, I should look for opportunities earlier to get the code under test instead of just testing in the browser.
  • To replace a SQLite database, you need to make sure you remove the -shm and -wal files instead of just the .db file.
  • It’s useful to replicate production data locally, and it’s a common enough task to merit its own script.

Lenny

Lenny is a tool I’m working on that will respond to templated emails I get from spammy marketers and recruiters with a sequence of templated responses to ask the spammers an endless series of dumb questions.

• Implemented simple templated responses
  • Example
• Started adding logic to remap recipient addresses to distinct sender addresses.
  • For example, when Lenny receives an email to contact@mydomain.example, it can respond as joe@mydomain.example. That way, I know all email that goes to that address should go to Lenny for auto-responses.
• Improved the classifier to recognize more types of guest post and recruiter spam.
• Lots of refactoring for testing.

Misc

• Helped my girlfriend sell her car.
  • Wild variance in dealer offers! The dealer who bought it paid 30% more than the first offer we got.
• Got a foldable treadmill (WalkingPad R2)
  • Kind of underwhelming because I thought I’d be able to run on it in the winter.
  • In review videos, it’s whisper quiet, but in real life, running on it is incredibly loud and causes my entire house to shake.
  • It arrived with one of the wheels broken, and it turns out that to replace a wheel, you have to dismantle the entire thing and disconnect all the electronics.
  • I negotiated a $200 refund from the manufacturer for the cost of doing my own replacement on the broken wheel, so hopefully that comes through.
• Experimented with Gerrithub
  • Doesn’t seem to do what I want.
  • I’m still desperate to go back to Gerrit, as it’s better than any other code review tool, but the hosted solutions are ~$1+k/mo.