Update for the week ending on Friday, Feb 11, 2022
TinyPilot
Management
- Met with peer founder to discuss management
- Had 1:1 with two members of dev team one member of local staff
- Met with EU distributor
- Raised issues with design firm about problems with the website redesign project
- Investigated why Gusto was underpaying employees
- It turns out that Gusto’s “Payroll Autopilot” is so automatic that it silently ignores
- Employers who have employees with variable hours therefore can’t use Payroll Autopilot
- Gusto’s actual process is that every two weeks, I go into Gusto approve hours in two separate pages so that TinyPilot employees get paid accurately.
- Helped fix an issue with Shopify’s shipping rates
- Started planning TinyPilot’s next dev team meeting
- Organized team lunch with TinyPilot local staff
- Reviewed inventory targets
Hiring
- Continued reviewing applications for TinyPilot Support Engineer role
- Stats so far
- Unreviewed applications: 59
- Hard rejected at cover letter/resume stage (no letter or didn’t meet requirements, so I didn’t send a response): 75
- Soft rejected at cover letter stage (they sent a detailed note, so I sent a personalized note back): 8
- Rejected at sample question stage: 2
- Passed cover letter/resume screen, still under consideration: 5
Software development
- Weighed in on database redesign
- Increased CircleCI build resources to speed up slow builds
Customer support
- Started making a flowchart of common technical support sequences
- I’m hoping to turn this into a self-help tool
- Started sponsoring flowchart.fun, a nice tool for making flowcharts out of text
Product research
- Met with electrical engineering partner to discuss manufacturing
Zestful
- Had my first customer support request in about a year
- A customer thought they were overbilled, so I pulled the logs and showed them all their requests, and they realized the bill was correct
- I was delighted that the log archiving system I set up two years ago still worked and was easy enough to work with that I could create a report for him in about 30 minutes.
What Got Done
- Fixed a bug that was preventing users from uploading new profile photos.
- I had an end-to-end test for this, but it never verified that the new photo actually took effect.
- Added better feedback for when profile photo updates fail
- Added better feedback when updates to the user profile page fail
- Refactored profile metadata controller to handle more of the HTTP logic
- Relaxed twitter handle parser to allow a leading
@ - Automatically upgrade HTTP connections to HTTPS
- This used to happen automatically on Firebase, but I didn’t realize I lost this when I switched to fly.io
- Upgraded my npm packages
- Renamed a bunch of components to match new Vue linter rules about components needing at least two words.
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 code for retrieving all email threads
- Added sorting into threads that are pending a response from the sender and those pending a response from Lenny/me.
- Added support for rendering time in browser’s local time
- I wasn’t converting before, so I wasn’t ever really sure what times the responses came in
- I realized after localizing times that I had recently sent a long response to a spammer about 90 seconds after they emailed me, so I think they realized it was automated.
- Added a mechanism for easily redacting information from threads to make it easier to screenshot
- Realized it’s funny sometimes if I send a response even if the template doesn’t actually match what the spammer said
- Added a lot more templates
- Added a mechanism for fixing broken threads
- Some clients apparently exclude the
In-Reply-ToandReferencesheaders, so Lenny was failing to associate those messages to their parent. - After I did it, I realized there was no way to do it without risking linking unrelated threads, so I rolled it back.
- Some clients apparently exclude the
mtlynch.io
- Published my January retrospective
Beancount
Beancount is a tool I discovered earlier this year for doing plaintext accounting. I love it, and I’ve done all my bookkeeping in it for the last year.
- One of the downsides of Beancount is that it’s hard to write tools that import transactions from your bank without including information specific to your account.
- I followed Siddhant Goel’s example and learned to make generic importers I could share.
- Published my first two open-source importers:
- Submitted my importers to awesome-beancount and /r/plaintextaccounting
Misc
- Did bookkeeping for January 2022
- Listened to a great interview about how Andreas Kling developed his own OS from scratch
- In the interview, Andreas mentions making clueless posts on Usenet when he was a kid, so I dug them up (he was a lot less clueless than I was at 14):
- Gave away some old stuff I had in old boxes
- A Mario Brothers lunchbox from 1989
- Unopened Coke cans from 1983 that my parents saved for some reason