Update for the week ending on Friday, Aug 19, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

• Continued hiring process for TinyPilot Support Engineer role
  • Current status
  • Processed 350 new applications
  • I’m getting way more applications this time, so I’ve changed the location requirement from “Worldwide” to “United States”
    • There’s a higher proportion of qualified candidates in the US, so this reduces the influx until I can get back on top of the applications
    • With 500 applicants already, I’m hoping there’s at least one qualified applicant already in the process

Software development

• Reviewed performance improvements to TinyPilot website

Customer support

• Filled in for customer support, as we’re shortstaffed this week due to illness

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.

• Almost done migrating from hardcoded responses to dynamic responses
  • So far, all of Stan’s responses are hardcoded in source
  • To add a new reply when Stan is out of replies, I have to recompile, make a PR, merge, and wait for it to deploy to my live server
  • I want to just store all the responses in SQLite so I can edit them on the fly
  • It’s tricky because the responses are a tree (maybe an acyclic graph if I get ambitious), which I’m finding difficult to represent in HTML
  • Screenshot

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.

• Added plaintext responses for guest uploads if the client doesn’t specify that they accept */* or application/json
  • This makes it simpler to upload to PicoShare guest URLs from the command-line
  • Command-line uploading works now, but I need to make it more discoverable
• Refactored JSON encoding

LogPaste

• Fixed a denial of service vulnerability by limiting the bytes a client can upload
• Found a better way of guessing whether the client is accessing the server over HTTPS
  • If the server is running behind a reverse proxy (like on fly.io or most hosting platforms), we assume HTTPS. Otherwise, assume plaintext HTTP.
  • It’s not super robust, but it works for my needs
• Removed an unnecessary prepared SQL statement
• Run fast tests in git hooks and slow tests in CI
• Changed CI to deploy the latest master branch to logpaste.com instead of waiting for an official release
  • Nobody should be depending on logpaste.com, so it’s fine if it’s running the bleeding edge version
• Added Go static analysis to the build

mtlynch.io

• Started writing up book report for Go Programming Blueprints by Mat Ryer

Dusty VCR

• Started editing latest episode

Misc

• Recorded a podcast interview
• Did monthly bookkeeping
• Reached out to a new accountant
  • Thanks to a reader recommendation!