Update for the week ending on Friday, Jan 13, 2023

TinyPilot

Management

• Led monthly support engineering meeting
• Two 1:1s
• Work with 3PL on figuring out how to handle unusual order flows
• Prep compliance testing for Voyager 2a
• Arranged for TinyPilot developers to get audio hardware for testing
• Managed a few large orders from China I’m trying to complete before Chinese New Year

Software development

• Started end-to-end testing process for TinyPilot Pro 2.5.1
• Fixed API for accepting order metadata from our distributor
• Reviewed script to set a static IP address
• Reviewed a change to convert demo videos on the website to use mp4 instead of GIF
  • They were historically GIF because they were visible on first page load
  • When we changed them to play only when clicked, we forgot to change them to MP4

Customer support

• Created a Github repo to hold support decision trees
  • We’re trying to figure out a way to keep support flows in source control
  • The idea is to create decision trees for different support scenarios, but have them in a place where we can code review changes
  • We’re going to try Mermaid, which Github and Notion support natively

Sales

• Helped with a complicated question about bulk international shipping
• Documented how to find HS codes for products

Misc

• Booked more of my travel for my upcoming trip to Europe
• Paid quarterly sales tax
• Switched from Logtail to Logflare
  • The appeal of Logflare is that it supports indefinite retention
  • So far, off to a rocky start
  • I want it as a tool for searching my logs, but it seems more designed for people who need to generate graphs from their logs

What Got Done

What Got Done has been in maintenance mode for a while. When I had to cycle keys last week to address the CircleCI breach, I had trouble getting What Got Done up and running again. I’m taking some time to de-clutter it and apply web development techniques I’ve learned since building it.

• Started converting Cypress tests to Playwright
  • This will stretch my Playwright skills a bit more because I’ve never used Playwright on an SPA.
• Deleted testing-data-manager
  • testing-data-manager is an old solution to a problem I still don’t have a great fix for, but I’ve decided I don’t like my old solution
  • The idea is that during end-to-end tests, I need to reset the database to a known state before each test so that tests don’t taint each other
  • My testing framework needs to clear the database and then repopulate it with static test data
  • I didn’t want to add a wipe database API in my production app because I don’t want it to be possible to accidentally call it and wipe my production database
  • I created a “sibling” web app that runs during my tests and is responsible for wiping and repopulating the database
  • The problem I found when I was dusting off What Got Done after a long absence was that this “sibling” web app architecture was very complicated to reason about and design my tests around
  • I’ve kept the essential idea, except that now the wipe and restore functionality is in the main app, but it’s compiled out in production
    • I’m not super happy with this, and it scares me to have a “wipe everything” API that close to production, but I think it’s the right tradeoff in terms of simplicity
• Simplified authentication logic
• Checked in the script I use to generate GCP creds
• Refactored cookie deletion into a function
• Fix path to the database
  • This one, I don’t even really understand how it’s worked before the fix
  • It’s supposed to make sure the parent directory for a SQLite database path exists (e.g., if the DB is data/store.db, then it should create the data/ directory)
  • Instead, the code was trying to create data/store.db as a directory
  • I guess I was getting lucky in that the DB already existed as a file in production, and in tests, something else happened to create the same file before the app ran.
• Created a convenience script for building the backend
• Upgraded my vue2 toolchain
• Switched the production build to use Alpine Linux
• Upgraded build to use Go 1.19

mtlynch.io

• Published my December 2022 retrospective
• Started my year 5 retrospective

Dusty VCR

• Continued editing So I Married an Axe Murderer episode

Misc

• Applied to speak at NERD Summit
  • CFP is still open until Monday.
  • I recommend it if you’re in the Western Mass area.