Update for the week ending on Friday, Feb 18, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

• Led monthly dev team meeting
• Adjusted project planning with design firm
• 1:1 with local staff member
• Resolved missing tax filing
  • Justworks (my former PEO) failed to submit the proper paperwork for 2021Q4 and it was a huge hassle to get it resolved

Hiring

• Started a trial hire with a Support Engineer
• Wrote onboarding documentation for Support Engineer position
• Continued screening Support Engineer candidates
• Stats so far
  • Total applications: 175 (+26 from last week)
  • Unreviewed applications: 40 (-19 from last week)
  • Hard rejected at cover letter/resume stage (no letter or didn’t meet requirements, so I didn’t send a response): 96 (+21 from last week)
  • Soft rejected at cover letter stage (they sent a detailed note, so I sent a personalized note back): 30 (+22 from last week)
  • Passed cover letter/resume screen, pending sample question responses: 3 (-2 from last week)
  • Rejected at sample question stage: 5 (+3 from last week)
  • Trial hire: 1 (+1 from last week)

Software development

• Weighed in on database architecture changes
• Reviewed PR to implement new footer design on website
  • Before
  • After
• Investigated why customers were reporting that they couldn’t complete checkouts because Shopify reported “Throttled” error
  • Turned out to be a Shopify bug that they resolved overnight
• Wrote guidelines for writing end-to-end tests for the TinyPilot sales site
• Tried unsuccessfully to get TinyPilot to send the KEY_SWITCHVIDEOMODE key
• Investigated why AppEngine is incorrectly geolocating my EU distributor’s test machine in an EU data center.
• Documented the source for USB HID keycodes

Customer support

• Updated documentation on handling refund requests
• Continued working on tech support decision tree

Product research

• Shipped PoE HATs to EE partner to repair throttling issue

PicoShare

PicoShare is a minimalist web-based file sharing tool I’m working on. I’m often frustrated that I can’t just send someone a link directly to a file because every file-sharing service tries to re-encode images/video or wrap their own viewer around other files, so I’m making a simple self-hostable tool that lets you upload files and share them with other people.

• Added support for logging in and logging out
• Added an upload button that doesn’t do anything yet
• Added CSS from Bulma and FontAwesome

social-go

• Published my first reusable Go module
  • Publishing Go modules is surprisingly hard!
  • Creating a v2 go module has weird gotchas
  • I couldn’t find any good explanations of the syntax for generating documentation on gopkg.dev
    • Seemingly irrelevant changes to the example code cause gopkg to stop rendering it as Go code

What Got Done

• Migrated social media handle parsing over to social-go

WanderJest

• Migrated social media handling over to social-go

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.

• Switched over to the Bulma CSS framework
  • Before
  • After
• Improved the login UI
  • Before
  • After
• Refactored response matching
  • Originally, I had “responders” that knew how to compose a particular message (e.g., the first reply in response to guest post solicitation)
  • The responders owned the logic of which messages they could respond to, so the parent would iterate through each available responder and see who was the right match
  • I realized this prevented me from reusing responses in different context, so now the matching of messages to responders happens outside the responder itself.
• Added more responses to different message sequences

LogPaste

• Fixed a missing return statement after a not found error

Zestful

• Responded to an inbound inquiry
• Fixed CI since it depended on a feature that CircleCI is sunsetting

Is It Keto

• Fixed CI since it depended on a feature that CircleCI is sunsetting

Misc

• Collected all my forms for 2021 taxes
• Upgraded my custom Docker Cypress image to Cypress 9.5.0
• Continued scanning old schoolwork and giving away old memorabilia