Update for the week ending on Friday, May 19, 2023

TinyPilot

Management

• Three 1:1s with teammates
• Continued onboarding new local teammate
  • Updated processes in response to feedback
• Met with experienced e-commerce owner for advice
• Did customer interview with a TinyPilot vendor
• Continued inventory planning for the next nine months
• Worked with 3PL to offer a next-day shipping option

Software development

• Made a proof-of-concept to pull nginx out of TinyPilot’s Ansible role
  • In continuing my long War on Ansible, I realized Ansible adds an annoying amount of abstraction on top of our nginx configuration, and we’d be better off installing it with Debian tooling.
• Started working on a script to render Jinja2 templates with TinyPilot data
  • This is also part of the War on Ansible. We need a non-Ansible way of rendering files from templates and using user-defined settings as the data.
• Reviewed third-party contribution for touch device support

Customer support

• Defined a process for doing special investigations
  • I realized we needed a different process for when something is affecting several users and they want updates, and we have to coordinate internally to solve the problem.
• Added some new entries to our customer support playbook

Sales

• Reached out to two YouTube creators about reviewing TinyPilot
• Reached out to two KVM resellers about carrying TinyPilot
• Complained to Amazon that they’re hiding the buy button on our listings
  • I’m guessing this is some sort of spite algorithm because for a while, we priced our Amazon listings higher than our website, but then Amazon refuses to give back the buy button even when we cave and charge the same rate as our site.

mtlynch.io

• Tweaked retrospectives page so that the index shows one-line summaries
  • Before
  • After
• Changed projects page to a nicer list
  • Before
  • After

WanderJest

• Translated all of the end-to-end tests from Cypress to Playwright
  • Cut 30s from a 6m build, though it also simplified it a lot.
  • I tried using Sourcegraph Cody AI for this and it was pretty mediocre, but just useful enough to try
  • Its best work is when I can tell it “Translate this from Cypress to Playwright” and it gets it right, but it also often injects subtle changes or hallucinates APIs that don’t exist.
• Simplified image uploads so that while they’re still temp images, we don’t store metadata in the datastore
  • It was previously confusing because we’d put the files in a GCP bucket and then record in the datastore where we the set is.
  • I realized it was easier to just save a JSON file alongside the set of images with metadata about the set.
• Refactored UserKit to match the interface of the session manager I use for ScreenJournal
  • I’m planning to eventually switch over to another roll-my-own solution to minimize third-party dependencies and make e2e tests faster
• Added a dropdown menu for picking performers
  • Screenshot
  • I started working on this in September 2022 but kept putting it on the backburner and coming back to make tiny amounts of progress
• Refactored build script to accept different Go build tags
• Refactored datastore interface to make it easier to end-to-end test
• Merged the gcp and gcs packages together
  • They both were about putting stuff in Google Cloud Storage, so it made no sense to have them in separate packages
• Refactored some old unit tests

ScreenJournal

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

• Documented WrapRequest method
• Refactored unit tests a little
• Made e2e tests catch test setup failures earlier

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.

• Infer content types for videos/audio when the client doesn’t specify or says application/octet-stream
• Added e2e tests for favicon routes
• Removed error return type from handlers.New, as it can’t fail
• Added unit tests for download handler
• Added logging for database purge events

Misc

• Did monthly bookkeeping
• Asked financial planner about tax loss harvesting
• Cut down some trees in my backyard
  • Before
  • After
• Switched from OneDrive to SyncThing
  • I’ve been syncing a few files across computers with OneDrive for like 10+ years, and I tried SyncThing, and I like it a lot, so I’ve totally switched over.
  • I still need to deploy a cloud server because my devices aren’t necessarily going to be online at the same time.
• Switched from paperless-ng to paperless-ngx
  • I started using paperless-ng as a way of archiving printed documents a few years ago.
  • paperless-ng was a fork of paperless that sprung up after the original maintainer stopped working on the project
  • Then paperless-ng’s maintainer stopped, so paperless-ngx started
  • I was sticking with paperless-ng, but then I kept running into issues relating to me trying to keep it in sync with my NAS where it would be backed up, so I eventually decided to just switch to the Docker-based paperless-ngx on my main dev machine
• Replaced a bad disk in my NAS server
• Put together my fiance’s office chair
  • She got a refurbished Steelcase Leap from btod.com
  • I was impressed at the quality. I bought one new 4 years ago, and hers looked exactly like mine did new.