Update for the week ending on Friday, Nov 4, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

• Led dev team meeting
• Two 1:1s with staff
• Officially welcomed new support engineer
  • He started on a trial basis, but we’ve both agreed the trial was a success
• Met with hardware partner to review metal cases
• Reached out to three other 3PL vendors
  • Interviewed one of them
  • Followed up with previous 3PL vendor I talked to
• Started process of paying a new contractor with Remote.com
  • Not so hot on it so far
  • They didn’t prompt me to set up a payment method until the first invoice came in, but now it’s going to be several days before my payment method is active, meanwhile my contractor is waiting for payment
  • They don’t support the idea of hour and hourly rate, the contractor has to do arithmetic every invoice to calculate hours x hourly rate
  • They don’t support the concept of expense reimbursement, so the contractor has to manually add it to the invoice
• Explored options for producing more cases until we switch to metal
  • Option 1: Get other vendors to print the case
    • Downside: Every other vendor is 8-10x the price because we qualify for a state subsidy with our vendor
  • Option 2: Buy our vendor 1-2 new printers
    • Downside: Costs $5k per printer and we’d only use it for 2-3 months.
• Researched better strategy for managing HelpScout when someone’s on vacation
• Paid affiliates

Software development

• Submitted a fix to uStreamer to support audio on Janus 1.x
• Submitted a documentation fix to uStreamer
  • Updated Ansible role to include the corresponding fix
• Tried to reproduce an audio-capture proof of concept that our hardware partners shared
• Refactored Janus Debian package build
• Removed conflicts declaration from our Janus Debian package

Misc

• Switched vendors for cooling fans

mtlynch.io

• Started October retrospective

ScreenJournal

ScreenJournal is a new project I just started. The idea is basically Goodreads, but for TV and movies. Or letterboxd, but focused on small communities.

• Put in all the boilerplate (borrowing from PicoShare and Talk to Stan)
• Hardcoded two reviews into the web UI
• Refactored reviews so that they lived in a datastore interface instead of the UI
  • They were still hardcoded into the datastore
• Converted hardcoded reviews into a SQLite database
• Integrated Litestream
• Added end-to-end tests with Playwright
• Added a ratings index
• Added UI for adding a new review

PicoShare

• Simplified HTML template rendering and bundled HTML templates in the binary itself
  • I’m still not 100% satisfied with this solution because it requires me to specify the base template twice, but I can’t find a better way of doing it.

Home maintenance

• Arranged replacement siding panels to be installed