Update for the week ending on Friday, Jan 28, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

• 1:1 with member of local staff
• Wrote job posting for a technical support role
  • Haven’t really shared it anywhere yet.
• Scheduled office lunch

Software development

• Iterated on design doc to overhaul update workflow
• Reviewed a PR to redesign the menu bar to match the new site design
• Cut a beta release of the latest TinyPilot image
• Tested proof of concept of H264 integration

Product research

• Worked with EE vendor to resolve a heat issue with the Voyager 2 PoE HATs.
• Documented the testing process for Voyager 2 PoE HATs.
• Worked with 3D printing designer on improving Voyager 2 case.

Sales

• Wrote a spec for a custom graphic on the TinyPilot home page
• Responded to a customer interested in an Enterprise plan

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on 4th year annual review.

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.

• Lenny is now having conversations with spammers!
  • Example
  • Example
• Desperately adding support for different conversation paths
  • I only implemented support to responding to the spammers’ initial emails, so now I’m scrambling to automate responses deeper in the email sequence, which is a little trickier.
• Added support for mapping real identities to lenny identies
  • e.g., if a spammer sends an email to michael@example.com, I respond from a unique email I only use for lenny emails like mlynch21@example.com
  • This lets me auto-filter the replies back to Lenny when the spammers reply.
• Added support for sending via SMTP
  • It’s pretty cool that this plaintext protocol is still how email works 40 years later
• Added correct email headers to replies
• Added support for BCC so that I have full records in my normal inbox as well
• Refined response templates to handle the case where we can’t deduce the spammer’s first name
• Added recognition for several instances of guest post and backlink spam
• Added a convenience script that helps me repair the prod database
• Lots of refactoring

Home maintenance

• Replaced a dead battery on my doorbell
• Finally got my pellet stove repaired

Misc

• Presented a talk at my local Indie Hackers meetup: “Scaling Customer Support for TinyPilot”
• Did bookkeeping for December 2021
• Researched vacation destinations
• Baked brownies