Update for the week ending on Friday, Mar 4, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

• Onboarded design/dev firm to begin doing dev work on TinyPilot website
  • Previously, they were doing design only, and we were handling the implementation ourselves, but we’re going to try having them do implementation as well.
• Reviewed new Jira workflows with our new electrical engineering partner.
• Finished reviewing contract for new electrical engineering partner
• Coordinated with our manufacturer about an upcoming order
• Coordinated development for our H264 integration

Hiring

• Finished creating a contract and sending payment to TinyPilot’s first Support Engineer
• Continued editing onboarding docs for Support Engineers
• Continued processing applications
  • I tell candidates that I’m running a trial hire, but they can continue with the application and be on my shortlist if I decide to add another engineer or if the trial hire doesn’t work out.

Customer support

• Updated Voyager 2 quick start instructions so that they make sense for Voyager 2 PoE or non-PoE.

Product research

• Applied for a grant to fund development of the TinyPilot Voyager 3
  • A local nonprofit is awarding grants for businesses that are changing their designs or processes to work around supply chain shortages.

Sales

• Launched Voyager 2 PoE
• Reviewed new website designs
• Reviewed new product images for the website

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.

• Tried to figure out how I kept exhausting memory when uploading large files
  • I’m doing a thing I know is unusual - I’m storing the full contents of file uploads in SQLite (I know!)
  • I initially tried uploading a 168 MB file, and it exhausted memory on my fly.io server instance with 256 MB of RAM
  • Okay, that’s not surprising. I can’t insert 168 MB of data into SQLite without creating at least one copy in RAM, and maybe it was even creating more than one copy.
  • I tried instead writing the data in SQLite in 33 MB chunks - it still exhausted memory - huh?
  • Is it just the upload in general? Can a server with only 256 MB not handle more than 256 MB of upload data?
  • I tried discarding the data instead of storing it in SQLite - no memory exhaustion.
  • Okay, so inserting into SQLite is definitely what’s exhausting memory.
  • I tried setting a bunch of pragmas limiting SQLite’s cache size and telling it to store temp data on disk instead of RAM - still exhausted memory
  • Maybe those pragmas need to be directly before the insert command? No difference.
  • Maybe it’s because all the chunks are still happening in a single transaction? I split it into independent SQLite queries - still exhausted memory
  • Tried reproducing under a Docker container with only 64 MB of RAM - doesn’t exhaust memory
  • So it works on Docker but not on fly.io. Maybe Docker isn’t really limiting memory?
  • Tried reproducing on Heroku - doesn’t exhaust memory.
  • BUT Heroku’s minimum RAM size is 512 MB
  • Tried turning my fly.io instance’s RAM up to 512 MB - doesn’t exhaust memory (good)
  • Tried uploading a 1 GB file to my fly.io instance with only 512 MB RAM - doesn’t exhaust memory (good)
  • So the workaround is to use at least 512 MB of RAM, but I’m still stumped as to what’s exhausting memory when the server has only 256 MB of RAM.
• Added better error handling for failed fetch calls
• Iterated on the landing page to try to better explain what the tool does

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.

• Added a response for SEO spam

mtlynch.io

• Started February 2022 retrospective
• Started writing up notes for Go Programming Blueprints

What Got Done

• Renamed Username to UsernameLink to match Vue’s new linter rules.

Misc

• Sent tax documents to my accountant
• Took a glass blowing class with my family