Update for the week ending on Friday, Feb 17, 2023

TinyPilot

Management

• Led crossover meeting between dev + support engineering teams
  • Strangely, it’s the first time anyone at TinyPilot has had a face-to-face meeting with a teammate that doesn’t share their job role and isn’t me
• Scrambled to deal with office construction
  • They’re doing repairs after a pipe burst last week, and every day building management has a new answer about whether we have to relocate offices within one business day or whether they can do the repairs without disturbing our office.
  • Moved all TinyPilot computers to a spare office.
  • Configured critical Pi servers to read-only mode.
  • Got duplicate keys made for the spare office.
• Accidentally knocked out networking in the office for a day
  • In testing Internet for the new office, I moved the router to the new office, and it just stopped assigning IP addresses, even when I moved it back to our original office.
  • I went crazy trying to figure out what was going on, but I was limited in not having any network connectivity or 4G access
  • I woke up the next morning and realized I connected the WAN cable to the wrong port on the router.
    • I’m too used to switches, where the ports don’t matter.
• Two 1:1s with teammates

Software development

• Spec’ed out a high-level process for creating a uStreamer Debian package for TinyPilot
• Reviewed a script to expand the OS partition of a microSD before first boot
• Added better documentation to a TLS key cycling script in TinyPilot Pro
• Fixed a minor typo in uStreamer

Customer support

• Reviewed new FAQ article about enabling audio
• Reviewed a proposal to integrate decision trees into our support flow
• Reviewed a proposal to redesign our internal support playbooks

Sales

• Published a blog post announcing the Voyager 2a
  • We actually started selling it three weeks ago, but I’d been holding off on the announcement until we completed the software changes we needed to enable its audio functionality.

mtlynch.io

• Published January retrospective.
• Ported newsletter backend to node.js 18 due to AppEngine deprecation

ScreenJournal

ScreenJournal is basically Goodreads, but for TV and movies. Or letterboxd, but focused on small communities.

• Added CLAbot to the project

Talk to Stan

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.

• Added color coding to distinguish thread participants
  • Example
  • Before, it was just all black and white, so it made it harder to track who’s who.

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.

• Reviewed a PR to make the server handle shutdown signals gracefully
• Trimmed extraneous parts of the AGPL that I accidentally copied into my LICENSE file

resticpy

• Reviewed a PR to add --no-cache option

Misc

• Purchased tickets to Microconf
• Tried setting up VLANs on my Ruckus WiFi AP and EdgeRouter
  • I successfully set up the VLANs, but I can’t figure out how to let traffic exit the VLAN to the Internet or other networks.
• Did TinyPilot’s January bookkeeping.