Update for the week ending on Friday, May 20, 2022
TinyPilot
Management
- Four 1:1s with team
- Reached out to lawyer for a review of our EULA
- Worked with landlord on a lease renewal
- Reviewed performance on search ads
- Much less promising than the initial few weeks.
- Google is down to roughly breakeven after cost of ads and raw materials.
- Bing cost $700 and yielded 0 sales in the last two weeks
Software development
- Finished implementing an About page in the TinyPilot web app for showing version information and crediting open-source dependencies
- This was surprisingly hard!
- It’s hard to track down all the dependencies and then organize their information in a sensible way.
- Reviewed design overhaul of shopping cart page
- Started porting our Python license check web service to Golang
- We want to add more sophistication to it, including supporting multiple backends, so Go will make that much easier.
- Plus, it currently runs as a Google Cloud Function, and I’d much rather run it under the much simpler fly.io infrastructure.
- Reviewed PR to build a Debian package for Janus on CircleCI
Customer support
- Added an entry in the playbook about how to answer the question “Will TinyPilot work on my device?”
Sales
- Published blog post announcing May 2022 update
- Sent blog post to mailing list subscribers
- Researched becoming an Amazon seller
- Signed up for an Amazon Seller account
- It’s a weird process.
- I still have to wait another week to get a postcard from them to verify my address.
- Registered UPCs for TinyPilot Voyager 2
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.
- Continued working on support for editing expiration time
- Everything works except the e2e tests
- I think I’m hitting a bug in Cypress
WanderJest
- Added (currently very manual) support for shortlinks
- Continued porting the datastore from Google Firestore to SQLite
mtlynch.io
- Finalized 2022-04 profit numbers
- Fixed a mistake in my 2022 Q1 expenses calculation
Misc
- Did monthly bookkeeping
- Mowed lawn