Update for the week ending on Friday, Jul 15, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

• 1:1 with local staff member and support engineer
• Coordinated with manufacturer and local staff to manage low supply

Software development

• Added integration tests for Gatekeeper
• Added a LaterThan function for TinyPilot versions in Gatekeeper
• Added support in Gatekeeper for parsing pre-release install bundles
• Continued working on REST APIs for getting latest version available and downloading install packages
• Updated paths to license files for Ansible dependencies (for our About page)

Customer support

• Handled a complicated return
• Resumed offering USPS as a shipping option to Australia
  • USPS hasn’t been able to reliably ship to Australia since mid-2021
• Revised our customer support guidance on responding to customers who ask for discounts
  • Our previous policy was that if someone asked for a discount, we assume they’re going to be a problem customer and we gently steer them away from buying
  • We got an email from someone who said they bought one device and loved it so much they want more, so could we offer a discount?
  • We decided to adjust out policy for existing customers, so we offered a discount, and he ended up purchasing three more

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on my website redesign post
• Commissioned artwork for my redesign blog post
• Started a new post about my search for a minimalist JS library
• Started writing up notes about backing up encrypted ZFS snapshots

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.

• Debugged an issue that was causing parsing to fail on inbound emails
• Added more responses to the guest post sequence

Home maintenance

• Repaired my porch screen
  • Basically involved pulling out a lot of old staples and re-stapling the screen

Misc

• Reimaged my main desktop
  • My SSD got corrupted! I’ve never seen this before.
  • I could boot into Windows recovery and access most of my user files, but certain files were unreadable.
  • It seemed to be at the hardware level because I tried wiping the disk with GParted (Linux), and that just errored out also
  • Got Amazon to overnight me a new SSD, and I reinstalled Windows and my apps
  • Reinstalling was a pain, but it’s also sort of nice to start over and reevaluate different workflows
  • I’m using the opportunity to try to switch from Chrome to Firefox
• Met with another hardware founder
• Continued working with my fiance on our from-scratch wedding website
• Read “Implementing a simple jq clone in Go, and basics of Go memory profiling”
  • Lots of good tips about performance profiling in Go
  • Impressive how much of JSON he’s able to handle in such a small amount of code
• Got rid of a bunch of DVDs