Update for the week ending on Friday, Jun 3, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

• Two 1:1s with teammates
• Prepared agenda for closing call with design agency

Software development

• Continued porting our license check REST endpoint from Python to Go.
• Reviewed plans to create a TinyPilot install package.
• Reviewed changes to TinyPilot product page
  • Before
  • After
• That page officially concludes TinyPilot’s website redesign, which took eight months and cost $48k
  • It was supposed to be two months and cost $10-15k
• Fixed a modal dialog that we accidentally broke during the website redesign
• Added git pre-commit hooks to the TinyPilot website

Customer support

• Wrote instructions on recording screen captures
• Updated latency FAQ with instructions on trying H264 over WebRTC

Sales

• Reached out to a large distributor about a partnership
• Met with marketing freelancer
• Worked with large customer on a custom order
• Wrote instructions for how to do proactive customer outreach
• Reviewed new demo GIF on the website
  • This is a re-recording of the same scenario but with our new logo

mtlynch.io

• Started writing May 2022 retrospective
• Shared homelab blog post on Hacker News
  • Good example of retrying on the weekend.
  • I submitted twice during the week, and it got a handful of upvotes but never made it to the front page.
  • I submitted on a Sunday morning when there’s less competition (also fewer readers), and it hit #2.
  • It inspired someone else to share the blog post about building the TinyPilot prototype, which also made the front page.

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.

• Chased down a crash report

WanderJest

• Continued reimplementing the site using the lessons I’ve learned from PicoShare
  • Replacing Firestore with SQLite
  • Replacing Vue with Go templates
• I was originally going to incrementally transition from Vue to Go templates, but I decided it’s easiest to just tear out all the Vue and reimplement the frontend from scratch
  • I’ve reimplemented most of the performer functionality, but I still need to add support for editing profiles.

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.

• Added some more matchers and conversational content

Misc

• Scheduled the next Indie Founders meetup for Western Mass
• Looked for a new accountant.
  • They’re surprisingly hard to find.
  • Or rather, it’s hard to find one whose workflow isn’t “print everything out and bring it to my office” or “just email it to me.”
  • Probably going to go back to my old accountant and admit that I can’t do better like I thought.
• Continued ripping new Blu-Rays
  • I have a Python script for pulling streamable mp4s out of the raw ISOs, but it’s an ungodly mess
  • I’ve been using this opportunity to clean up the code and generalize all the little hacks that were specific to my media library