Update for the week ending on Friday, Dec 2, 2022

TinyPilot

Management

• Two 1:1s with teammates
• Monthly meeting with EE partner
• 1:1 with EU distributor
• Gave feedback to Pilot team about a poor experience with expense reimbursements
  • Contractors’ reimbursement was 7% less than they paid out of pocket due to Pilot taking high currency conversion fees out of the contractors’ end.
• Started the onboarding process with a 3PL vendor
• Ordered emergency cases from a second
  • We had record sales in November, so we were on track to run out of cases faster than I expected
• Caught up with invoices with EU distributor

Software development

• Removed most privileged scripts from ansible-role-tinypilot
  • And moved them to the core TinyPilot repo
  • I initially designed TinyPilot to use Ansible for installation because I didn’t know how to use Debian packages
  • Now that I understand Debian packages better, I’m seeing opportunities to simplify our install by replacing Ansible logic with Debian packaging logic
  • One big advantage is that it keeps TinyPilot logic in a single repo instead of splitting it across the core repo and Ansible repo
• Met with Vincent Bernat who gave me excellent advice about Debian packaging and Nix
  • Sent out notes to the dev team
• Reviewed a PR to install Janus from the debian-backports repo
  • Previously, we were rolling our own Janus Debian package, and it was burning tons of dev time
  • We realized the backports version meets our needs, and we wouldn’t have to maintain our own fork
• Added connect retries to the integration tests in Gatekeeper
  • There was a timing issue where the integration tests would fail if they launched before the server was serving
  • Adding three retries and two second sleeps solved it
• Adjusted CI so that we build a TinyPilot install bundle in every branch
• Adjusted CI so that we store the TinyPilot install bundle in CI as a build artifact
  • Previously, we were only storing the index of its files, but we realized it’s useful to store the full bundle as well

Customer support

• Reviewed new FAQ: “How do I change my TinyPilot’s EDID?”
• Did some troubleshooting with dev for HelpScout’s Amazon integration
• Continued adding to writing style guide

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.

• Stored TV and Movie Database (TMDB) ID in the screenjournal database
  • Previously, I was just storing whatever the user specified as the movie title
  • Storing the TMDB ID means that screenjournal can fetch metadata about the movie from TMDB (e.g., photos, release date)
• Add a mechanism for refreshing movie metadata
  • This way, if I decide to store more movie metadata in my local database, I can just hit this endpoint and force ScreenJournal to update its metadata based on what it finds in TMDB for its existing movies
• Add IMDB ID as additional metadata in local DB
• Add release date as additional metadata in local DB
• Decoupled session management from authentication
• Researched Go authentication and session management libraries
  • It was surprisingly hard
  • Most are very complex and want to take over too much of the auth experience
  • I’m probably going to go with jeff for session management and just standard bcrypt for authentication
• Redesigned review cards
  • Before
  • After
• Change navbar based on auth state
  • This previously worked, but I accidentally broke it at some point, so I’m really just restoring what I had
• Added per-user views of movie ratings
  • I’m the only user, so it doesn’t do anything yet, but hopefully it will mean something soon
• Added more rigorous password parsing
• Keep track of username in HTTP requests
• Previously, I was just cutting corners by hardcoding it to mike
• Added a convenience script for linting SQL scripts

Dusty VCR

• Published episode 25: The Little Mermaid w/ Chrissy P

Misc

• Demo’ed PicoShare at virtual Indie Founders of Western Mass online meetup
• Talked to a rep from the Github Copilot class action lawsuit
  • It was kind of silly, 15 mins of questions on a live phone call that could have been answered by looking at my Github profile