Update for the week ending on Friday, Sep 16, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

Continued onboarding new support engineer
- We’ve officially completed the trial period
Four 1:1s
Continued following up with candidates who applied for the Support Engineer position to let them know I’ve hired someone
Flagged copyright issues in another KVM over IP open-source project

Software development

Reviewed a PR to remove an unneeded npm package from the TinyPilot website
Suppressed pylint’s “too many lines in this file” rule
Reviewed a refactoring of CircleCI config into a standalone bash script

Customer support

Reviewed instructions for installing/updating TinyPilot through an HTTP proxy
- Turns out it’s trickier than we expected, so we’re chasing down some issues

Product development

Reviewed designs for a new steel case for TinyPilot

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.

Upgraded to Go 1.19
Refactored test script
Refactored a unit test

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.

Switched string length checks to use character count rather than byte count
- And then reverted it when I learned from Twitter friends that byte count is probably more appropriate
Experimented with Go’s native fuzzing
- My gripes with fuzzing so far
  - No way to just say “run all fuzz tests” the same way you can run all unit tests
  - No way to save state to avoid re-fuzzing the same inputs (except if you successfully trigger a fault)
  - Would love to have “fuzz new inputs for 30s” as a CI step, but the tooling doesn’t seem particularly friendly to that scenario
Added stricter filename parsing rules based on fuzz testing
- Forbid forward slashes in filenames
- Forbid control characters
- I think that the Go HTTP package actually takes care of this for me, but might as well have defense in depth

resticpy

Reviewed a PR to add support for the --dry-run flag
Reviewed a PR to add support for the --tag flag
Reviewed a PR to add support for more restic forget flags

Dusty VCR

Published episode 23: Back to the Future w/ Buddha Joe
Switched the RSS feed from my home-rolled rss-proxy to Bunny CDN
- My proxy was getting stuck with caching issues somewhere that I couldn’t figure out
- I realized Bunny can do this fine out of the box, so no need to use home-rolled tools
Watched Lars and the Real Girl in preparation for the next episode

Misc

Co-hosted the Western Mass Indie Hackers meetup
Tweeted every product I use for TinyPilot
Reviewed a bugfix for hello-world-cypress
Fixed a typo in Standard Ebooks’ copy of Mark Twain’s autobiography
Caught up with personal expense bookkeeping
Fiance and I replaced a cracked window we’d been putting off for six months