Update for the week ending on Friday, Jun 17, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

• Three 1:1s
• Sync meeting with EE partner
• Called MA Department of Unemployment Assistance to ask why they keep sending TinyPilot incomprehensible notices
  • Phone rep was not helpful
• Reviewed new office lease
• Continued my Quixotic search for a good accountant in MA

Software development

• Worked on our update overhaul
  • Added install bundle generation to CI
  • Upload install bundles to cloud storage
  • Added metadata to the install bundle filename
  • Started work on a REST endpoint for finding the latest version of TinyPilot Community
• Helped investigate how to improve the sync between TinyPilot Community and TinyPilot Pro git repos
• Fixed a minor bug on the TinyPilot sales site
  • It was saying “Ships in 1-3 business days” for TinyPilot Pro even though it’s an instant download

Customer support

• Reviewed a revised tutorial for integrating remote.it with TinyPilot

Sales

• Met with medical devices startup interested in using TinyPilot
• Met with large customer
• Sent proactive outreach email to a large customer
• Tried running Amazon ads
• Call with Amazon account manager to discuss getting started on Amazon
  • All of his suggestions coincidentally involved giving Amazon more money

WanderJest

WanderJest is a site I started in 2020 to find live comedy. I shelved it due to the pandemic, but now I’m resurrecting it and reimplementing it to replace Firestore with SQLite and Vue with Go HTML templates.

• Refactored auth checks so that there’s only One True Way of checking authentication information
• Added a signup flow for fan users
• Added support for editing fan user information
• Added a signup flow for brand new performers
  • There’s a distinction between performers WanderJest has never heard of and performers that WanderJest lists but are unclaimed
  • You can create a new performer instantly, but I have to manually activate already-registered performers to prevent people from claiming other people’s accounts.
• Ported over the privacy policy from the legacy site
• Ported over some e2e tests
• Added a page for viewing a fan user
• Imported old fan data to SQLite

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.

• Fixed a bug in the pattern matching
• Added more responses for guest link posts and backlink spam posts

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.

• Removed workaround for SQL linter

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on a blog post about the TinyPilot website redesign

Misc

• Tried to figure out a clever way of hosting a Zola wedding website on a custom domain
  • Zola doesn’t natively support it, but I thought I could force it to work with an nginx reverse proxy
  • It unfortunately didn’t work. It loads almost everything via JS from other domains where the domain name is baked into the code. Naive search/replace didn’t work, and I was getting too far into the weeds to have confidence that even if I got it working that it would work for very long.
• Met with landscaper to figure out how to restore privacy to my yard after my neighbors cut down the nice foliage that used to separate our properties