Update for the week ending on Friday, Jul 8, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

• Coordinated logistics for next batches of TinyPilot manufacturing
• Finalized patent license to integrate H264 encoding into TinyPilot
  • Surprisingly high amount of work on both sides to sign a licensing agreement where I’d need to grow 80x to reach the threshold where I’m paying more than $0 in licensing fees
• Paid commissions to TinyPilot affiliates

Software development

• Reviewed a fix to the new TinyPilot installer
• Continued working on adding TinyPilot Pro support to the TinyPilot release manager
• Continued experimenting with CodeApprove
  • Gave feedback on Github
  • The founder has been super responsive in addressing feedback, so I’m considering switching away from Reveiwable entirely

Customer support

• Thought about a better process for passing customer support tickets between people
  • We currently don’t have a formal process, so the receiving person has to do a lot of redundant work re-reading the thread to understand everything that’s happened
  • I’m thinking about how we can do a “pass-off summary”
• Helped with some complex customer support tickets

Sales

• Handled questions from a few customers about large orders
• Sold a new TinyPilot Enterprise license

mtlynch.io

• Published my June retrospective
• Continued progress on my blog post about TinyPilot’s website redesign
• Added support in the TinyPilot Pro license checker for orders placed through Amazon
• Started a short blog note explaining how to back up encrypted ZFS datasets
  • I’m adding a separate category on my blog for quick notes that I want to capture but that I don’t want to polish to the same degree as blog posts
  • Published the accompanying scripts, but they’ll probably make more sense with the blog post
• Fixed revenue charts I’d accidentally broken in my year 4 blog post

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.

• Brought back the logo and navbar
  • Before
  • After (still needs some work)
• Added more user-friendly 404 pages for performers and shows
• Added more rigorous parsing for show IDs
• Starting adding forms to add a new show
• Reimplemented the sitemap

Misc

• 1:1 catchup with another ex-Google founder
• Interviewed two wedding photographers
  • It’s surprising how the industry standard seems to be not to sell you the photos, just a limited license to view/print the photos
  • I asked both photographers what the cost would be to purchase the copyright to the photos, and they both were taken aback and said nobody had ever asked that
    • One flat out refused to sell the copyright for any price
    • One might have declined but might not have understood our request
• Attended the Luthier’s Comedy Showcase
• Experimented with frontend frameworks
  • alpine.js - Almost what I want, but it’s incompatible with CSP, and the advertised CSP-friendly version hasn’t actually been released
  • petite-vue - Appealing idea (minimal Vue without the compile step), but it’s totally incompatible with CSP and is still experimental
  • htmx - Doesn’t really resonate with me but @czue loves it, so I’m curious. It works with CSP, but it also basically undermines it and turns every page element into an XSS vector
  • Django: Tried the tutorial, still feels too heavyweight. It spooks me that a basic hello world includes a bunch of components I don’t understand.
  • Rails: Only tried a little bit of the tutorial
• Researched other frontend frameworks
  • Elm: Has a compile step, which I don’t want
  • Svelte: Ditto