Update for the week ending on Friday, Jun 24, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

Led monthly dev team meeting
Team lunch with local staff
Call about video codec licensing

Software development

Upgraded TinyPilot to pylint 2.14.2
Added an explicit encoding to all Python open() calls of text files
Reviewed an external submission to remove a pylint global suppression
Added a REST API for retrieving the latest TinyPilot Community version
```
$ curl https://gk.tinypilotkvm.com/community/available-update
{"version":"725b1a1"}
```
- We theoretically could have just used a Github API for this, but we’re going to use the same mechanism for TinyPilot Pro, which is not in a public Github repo

Customer support

Reviewed a rewrite of our remote.it tutorial
- remote.it had changed their signup flow, so our previous tutorial was out of date
Added an “out of date” warning to our Voyager 1 instructions
- We had a Voyager 2 customer who was confused because they must have found them through Google looking for the current instructions
Took over a support ticket with an upset customer

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.

Added support for claiming an existing performer profile
Added integration tests for viewing performer pages

Misc

Sort of found an accountant
- It took a month to set up a call, but other accountants are not returning calls at all
Gathered numbers about my home office to send to my accountant
- I feel like accountants always ask me to gather a bunch of information about my home expenses so they can get me a deduction on my home office, and it ends up being a deduction of like $6 for an hour of work.
Did bookkeeping for May
Added better sanity checking to my beancount (plaintext accounting) setup
- One problem with plaintext accounting is that when you move money from one account to another (e.g., transfer from bank A to bank B, pay credit card bill A with bank B), there are two records of the transaction (one from each bank)
- One solution is to just delete one of the transactions, but I don’t like throwing away data
- My preferred solution is to record the transfer to a virtual account
  - In other words, a transaction of $100 from Bank A to Bank B on the Bank A side would look like -$100 from Bank A, +$100 to in-flight transfers
  - The same transaction from the bank B transaction would look like +$100 to Bank A, -$100 from in-flight transfers
  - In the end, Bank A would have $100 less, Bank B would have $100 more, and the virtual “in-flight transfers” account would have a balance of $0 because its transactions cancel out
  - The problem is that I didn’t have any validation that the “in-flight transfers” account ultimately canceled out, so I had orphaned transactions that looked like part of transfers, but they actually weren’t.
- I’ve solved it with a pre-commit hook that validates that all of my virtual transfers ultimately cancel out and return to a zero balance.
Fixed a few bookkeeping mistakes that my new sanity check uncovered
- Good news: I made ~$1k more than I thought in 2021
- Bad news: I have to re-do my tax return
Wrote a long HN comment about code review tools
- I got interesting feedback and discovered some new code review tools I didn’t know about
- Crocodile: Just came out, seems like it’s not quite mature yet, but I’m interested to see where it goes
- CodeApprove: Not available yet, but founded by an ex-Googler, so I’m hoping it adopts the things I liked about Google’s tools
- Graphite: Supposedly inspired by Phabricator (Facebook) and Critique (Google), but it seems like it leans way more toward Phabricator. It makes a big deal about stacked changes, which I care about much less than other features of a code review tool.
- Review Board: Interesting, but I don’t like that it’s a tool for reviewing code and images and PDFs. The design reminds me a lot of FogBugz.
- git-appraise: Played around with it a little bit and didn’t get it. It seems like it’s mainly CLI-based. It’s created by Google employees but not a Google-supported project.
Gave away a bunch of old TV show DVDs
Put up my old NAS server for sale
Cleared two wasp nests that appeared on my house