Update for the week ending on Friday, Jun 16, 2023

TinyPilot

Management

• Three 1:1s with teammates
• Sent a detailed email to the team about our transition to a contract manufacturer over the next several months
• Did inventory planning for the transition from in-house manufacturing to a contract manufacturer
• Met with my accountant and tax specialist about MA tax R&D tax credit
  • It turns out that you can’t claim an R&D tax credit in MA if you’re a single-member LLC, which means an increase in TinyPilot’s taxes by ~$6k/yr.
• Emailed my senators to complain more about Section 174 and encouraged them to co-sponsor S.866.
• Adjusted shipping process for our 3PL

Software development

• Started release process for TinyPilot Pro 2.6.0
• Refactored how we track default settings
• Reimplemented how we populate app_settings.cfg to take Ansible out of the stack
• Reviewed consolidation of ansible-role-ustreamer into TinyPilot git repo
  • It didn’t have any known clients outside of TinyPilot, and it’s a lot simpler if we have a monorepo.
• Backported end-to-end tests from Pro to Community
• Fixed a bug in CI config that prevented microSD image builds on tagged releases.

Customer support

• Reviewed FAQ article about setting up a mouse jiggler

Sales

• Sent a demo unit to a new YouTube reviewer

mtlynch.io

• Published my May retrospective
• Built my first home server rack
  • Photo
  • It’s not complete yet, as I’m still waiting on the UPS
  • I’m eventually going to convert the VM server and storage server to rack-mount chassis, but that’s longer-term

Misc

• Attended a virtual bris
• Fixed my Pi-based print server
  • In building the rack, I cut power to it and corrupted the filesystem
• Experimented with NixOS
  • I tried installing it on a VM, but it went into an unbootable state
  • I tried installing it on an old Dell mini, and it works
  • Successfully created an ad-hoc Node environment with nix-shell -p nodejs-16_x