Update for the week ending on Friday, May 27, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

• Reviewed TinyPilot’s EULA with an IP lawyer
• Led TinyPilot mothly dev meeting
• TinyPilot lunch with local team
• Reviewed Google Ads performance
  • It’s doing worse than last month.
  • ROAS was at 2.45 last month. Now it’s at 2.03 for May and 1.92 for the last couple of weeks.

Software development

• Reviewed update overhaul plan
• Reviewed proof-of-concept for new TinyPilot install bundle creator
• Investigated keygen.sh as a licensing solution for TinyPilot
• Continued porting TinyPilot’s license check web service from Python to Golang
  • Really enjoying the process, as Golang fits this problem in a pretty elegant way
• Added a better error message for expired licenses on the license check page
  • Users were emailing support not sure what to do when they got a license expired error, and I realized we needed to show them a link for where they could renew their license.
• Reviewed migration to pre-built Janus Debian package
  • This reduces a 20-30 min process of compiling code from source to a few seconds of installing pre-compiled binaries.
• Reviewed a fix for a bug in the logout button on Pro
• Refactored about page implementation

Sales

• Worked with a large customer on a custom order
• Continued the search for a marketing agency / freelancer
• Continued trying to set up an Amazon Seller account
  • Got my address verified, but then they needed to verify my credit card (which takes 24 hours for some reason)
  • Got my credit card verified, and now they need to verify that I can use the brand name “TinyPilot” which takes up to 72 hours…
• Revised feature bullets for the Voyager 2 on the sales page

mtlynch.io

• Published my NAS server blog post and accompanying video

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 changing the file expiration time after uploading it.
• Added a shellcheck bash lint check to the CI build.
• Refactored run-go-tests script
• Added a unit test for parsing an empty string as a file note
• Added a license notice to the Docker image
• Cut the 1.1.7 release.

WanderJest

• Started reimplementing the frontend with Go templates
  • After seeing how much faster development is on PicoShare and Talk To Stan from just using vanilla Go templates instead of a full-blown frontend framework, I want to revisit WanderJest without Vue
  • I was originally going to try to do it incrementally, but I was finding it a ton of gruntwork to write transitional code.
  • I tried just tearing out the whole frontend and starting over, and that’s going pretty well.
  • I feel like I’m 3-4x faster in plain Go templates than creating a separate Vue frontend and a REST interface to pull down data.
  • If it goes well, maybe I’ll rip Vue out of What Got Done, too

Talk to Stan

Talk to Stan 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.

• Changed workflow to save raw email before attempting to parse it
  • The previous implementation attempted to immediately parse an email into structured data when we received it
  • The problem was that if the format was unexpected, we’d just drop the message on the floor
  • This workflow stores the original email so I can always retroactively re-parse later if I discover a bug in my parser
• Refactored docker entrypoint script
• Added more matchers for guest link and backlink spam

Zestful

• Adjusted logging to truncate the list of ingredients when it’s too long
  • We used to log all of the ingredients on error, but a user was doing a strange thing this week where they kept submitting 30k+ ingredients per request even though the responses were always an empty HTTP 400 error.
  • Still, the side effect was that it flooded our logs, so the logging change limits the damage from that type of behavior.

Is It Keto

• Fixed a bug in my templates that caused incorrect grammar on three pages
• Improved install instructions for my tooling

Misc

• Ripped about 50 new BluRays to ISOs and mp4s.
  • I saw that the complete series for a bunch of my favorite shows (The Office, 30 Rock, Friends, Parks and Rec) are now available on Blu-Ray for a pretty decent price.
  • Started rewriting my old, janky Python scripts to automate the ripping process.
• Struggled to debug a networking issue on my TrueNAS server and then a seemingly psychic redditor solved it without me ever having to ask for help.
  • The issue was that when I had several ripping operations going at once reading/writing to the NAS, it would suddenly lose network connectivity. The only thing that would get it back was a reboot.
  • TinyPilot obviously came in handy, as I could maintain console access even after the network died
  • It was tough to gather diagnostic information because normally I’d copy from the remote terminal, but I can’t since it’s just a video of the remote display
  • I discovered the script command, which saves all console interaction to a file, so I was able to save everything to a file for when I got network connectivity back.
  • The solution turned out to be using the official Realtek networking driver instead of the default, which is what I gather is an open-source FreeBSD reimplementation.
• Talked to another indie founder about inventory software
• Submitted a minor fix to TalkYard