Update for the week ending on Friday, Feb 4, 2022
TinyPilot
Management
- 1:1 with member of development team
- Shared TinyPilot support engineer job listing more widely
- Hacker News
- We Work Remotely
- I heard positive things about We Work Remotely, but so far (five hours in), I’ve gotten 10 applications that were just generic copy/paste spam and two spam solicitations from other job boards.
- Sent declines to two applicants (who found the job from Twitter) who wrote thoughtful cover letters but weren’t a good match.
- Continued working on transition to new EE vendor
- Synced with 3D printing vendor about case changes
- Fixed a bug in my bookkeeping scripts for recording payroll
- I was recording all payments to my payroll provider, but I wanted to split out the separate amounts I was paying for the service itself, wages, and worker’s comp.
- Paid affiliates for referrals
Software development
- Reviewed a PR to implement the navbar from the new site design
- Reviewed a design proposal to change how TinyPilot handles database connections.
- Tested proof of concept for H264/WebRTC implementation
- Reviewed and revised documentation for H264 implementation
- Fixed DKIM records for Amazon SES (mailing list)
Sales
- Iterated on new website graphics with design firm
mtlynch.io
- Published “My Fourth Year as a Bootstrapped Founder”
- Wrote about 80% of my January retrospective
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.
- Overhauled how I track email threads
- Before, I wasn’t creating any DB tables to track threads and was just inferring the threads at runtime by parsing the headers in individual emails and combining them.
- I realized that that got complicated and wasn’t going to scale, so now I have separate DB tables to track email threads, and I update them when new emails come in.
- Redesigned how I generate email responses
- Now it’s more flexible and easier to essentially design flow charts of conversations depending on the spammer’s content
- Added support for customized template data based on the spammer’s most recent email
- I still need to iterate on this, as it’s still not as flexible as I want
- Examples
- Changing Lenny’s response based on whether the spammer mentioned pricing
- Including text from the spammer’s email in the response
- Fixed a timezone bug in datetime serialization/deserialization
