Update for the week ending on Friday, Jan 20, 2023

TinyPilot

Management

• Broke up with TinyPilot’s new 3PL vendor
  • They were good for regular orders, but I found their desired process for handling exceptions (e.g., customer changes address after order, customer pasy with purchase order) a little too complicated and error-prone
• Continue prepping for Voyager 2a launch next week
  • Registered new GTINs
  • Finished making changes to website
• Two 1:1s

Software development

• Published TinyPilot Pro 2.5.2
  • Soft release for the week, will be followed by broader announcement next week
• Switched TinyPilot’s logging backend
  • I thought Logflare would be a good match because it offers unlimited log retention, but it’s pretty bad at searching logs
  • I tried every single log management tool that’s compatible with Fly.io, and wasn’t thrilled with any of them
  • I ended up going crawling back to Logtail, as they’re the closest to what I want
  • I took notes on the options because I keep reviewing options and then forgetting why I reject certain platforms
• Fixed shell for tinypilot user
• Added some dev scripts to update server
• Refactored order number parsing on update server
• Delete the default pi user from pre-made TinyPilot microSD images
  • Previously, we were just disabling it
• Switched the TinyPilot base image from Raspbian Buster to Raspbian Bullseye
  • In the next release, we’ll be fully Bullseye compatible, and the default image will be Bullseye-based
  • I was expecting more issues, but so far, it’s looking like everything works out of the box

Customer support

• Reviewed an update to WiFi FAQ that explains how to disable it.
• Worked with team on possibility of adding decision trees for customer support

Sales

• Prepped TinyPilot website for switchover to Voyager 2a

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on my year 5 retrospective

What Got Done

• Converted e2e tests from Cypress to Playwright
  • Learned a bit more about Playwright
  • Hit some of the rougher edges of Playwright with SPAs
  • I was expecting the Playwright tests to be much faster, but the overall test experience is now slower
  • The upside is that the e2e testing step is isolated and less flaky, which means that when tests fail, it’s easier to debug them
• Fixed CSP settings for image uploads in dev mode
• Updated my script for generating a gcloud auth token so that it actually works
• Specify GCS bucket in fly.toml instead of an environment variable
• Make log messages consistently not capitalized

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.

• Make log messages consistently not capitalized
• Fixed text alignment in footer
• Fixed flakiness in tests due to changes in the TV Movie Database

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.

• Make log messages consistently not capitalized
• Replace ! in URLs with -
  • I didn’t realize when I chose ! that it wouldn’t work in URLs in bash because ! is a shell special character
  • - fixes the issue
• Rename types package to picoshare
• Split up sqlite.go

resticpy

• Reviewed contribution of support for cat command
• Prepared init command to handle responses 0.15.0 style responses
• Document the keys commands
• Use an environment variable in CircleCI to specify the current restic version

Dusty VCR

• Published the So I Married an Axe Murder (w/ Darren Sechrist) episode
• Fixed redirects that I accidentally broke in the switch from Firebase to Netlify
• Made some style fixes

Misc

• Got a haircut