Update for the week ending on Friday, Aug 26, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

Hired a new Support Engineer
Updated ramp-up docs
Led monthly dev team meeting
Responded to other candidates for Support Engineer position
1:1s with two teammates

Software development

Added more details to unintuitive behavior in TinyPilot’s keyboard emulation
Fixed a bug in the TinyPilot Shopify theme that was preventing customers from paying with Shop Pay
Fixed a minor bug in Gatekeeper

Customer support

Had a call with a large customer about feature requests / pain points
- Filed a few bugs / PRs based on the call

LogPaste is my minimalist service for posting and sharing plaintext files. I had a few hours in a hotel room last week, so it was a good time to do port back some DevOps improvements I’d discovered while working on PicoShare and other projects.

Change database initialization to happen in a series of migrations
Added whitespace checks to CI
Simplified the handler for static resources
Integrated shellcheck into CI
Integrated errcheck into CI
Added a hot reloading script
Use a better JavaScript technique for getting the base URL

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.

Refactored Go templates to inlined HTML and JS
Track authentication in a context handler

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.

Reviewed an external contribution to improve cleanup performance
Reformatted everything with Prettier

mtlynch.io

Reformatted everything with Prettier
- Lots of churn, but I like having automatic, consistent formatting and conventions

Portfolio Rebalancer

I’ve abandoned this as a business, but I still use it to rebalance my portfolio and might one day add all the features I need.

Adjusted the CSV parser to support Vanguard’s new CSV format
Removed the Stripe JS library I forgot to delete even after dropping payments
Moved from Firebase to Netlify
- My Firebase deploys were failing, and I prefer Netlify, so I figured it would be easier to move to Netlify than to debug Firebase
Formatted everything with Prettier
- Noticing a theme?

Home maintenance

Finally found a plumber to do bathroom repairs
- Called three different plumbers over two weeks before one finally returned a call
Water started leaking through my ceiling five minutes after the plumber left (!!!)
- Fortunately, the leak was in the best possible place for a leak to be because it’s an area with no rug, furniture, or electronics, so we just had to put down some rags to soak up the water
- I was able to shut off the water main quickly and I got the plumber back within 20 minutes
- It turned out that he accidentally left a pipe open (?) for a few minutes when working on the shower faucet, so water must have leaked into the wall, but when we turned the main back on, there was no more leak

Misc

Took a trip to Michigan and Ohio for a wedding
Sent tax documents to a new accountant
- My third attempt at paying an accountant to prepare my not-very-complicated 2021 tax return
Listened to an interview with Akiva Shaffer
- And then watched the music video for “Finest Girl” 800 times
  - I liked the song from Popstar but I never knew Lonely Island made a whole music video for it