Update for the week ending on Friday, Jul 28, 2023

TinyPilot

Management

• Two 1:1s with teammates.
• Continued working with contract manufacturer on moving manufacturing from in-house to their facility.

Software development

• Investigated a break in our license checking service.
  • There turned out to be a few interesting issues.
  • All of a sudden, the license check was returning “order not found” for every order.
  • The main problem turned out to be that Fly’s auto-migration somehow reverted one of our environment variables back to a placeholder value.
  • But I had trouble identifying that as the problem because it turned out that our service was swallowing errors when it tried to call Shopify’s GraphQL API.
  • We were calling Shopify via a Go http.Client and checking the error code of the Do method, but we forgot to also check the HTTP status code of the response, so we didn’t notice that it was failing. It ended up looking equivalent to “succeeded but returned 0 results.”
  • And then even after we added a check there, we were swallowing the error at another layer because we check multiple backends (different sales channels that could have created the order) to see if they recognize an order. For a valid order, we expect all of backends to fail except for the one backend that knows about the order.
  • So we had to adjust the logic there to say, “If you fail to find a matching order, and one of the backends reported an error other than ‘can’t find the order’, then bubble up the error.”
• Reviewed documentation on migrating our Ansible roles to Debian packages.
• Reviewed an update to TinyPilot’s pre-made image for better fan control.
• Documented my weirdo-minimalist way of managing Python packages
• Reviewed an update to our UI style guide around width for input fields
• Reviewed PR that made implicit pip dependencies explicit
• Reviewed a bugfix on input validation for the hostname field
• Reviewed a re-sorting of our depenencies

Customer support

• Reviewed new FAQ about bringing your own TLS key
• Updated our invoice templates to include the customer’s email address.
  • We got a small bump in support emails recently from people who use multiple email aliases and had forgotten which one they used to purchase.
    • For example, they have both john@example.com and john.smith@example.com, so they see the order confirmation in their john@example.com mailbox and assume that’s what they used to order.
    • Now, if they have their invoice, hopefully they’ll see the email address on the invoice and realize which one they used for the order.

Sales

• Sent a review unit to a blogger.

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on a blog post about an old documentary.

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.

• Migrated the main server to Fly apps v2

Misc

• Visited Montreal for the third time
  • Cool city!
  • One thing I didn’t notice before is how it practices a lot of modern urban design techniques like protected bike lanes, lots of park space, dense (but not crowded) housing.
  • I only had like three poutine fries, though, shamefully.
• Ordered a portable solar charger and cell phone battery
  • They’re both wirecutter recommendations
  • We had a power outage a few weeks ago, and I realized it would be good to be able to recharge my phone in a future outage
  • I was originally planning to get a hand-crank charger, but I read estimates on reddit that to charge a typical phone to full power on a hand crank, you’d have to crank at full power for an hour, which is probably not what you want to do in an emergency situation.