Update for the week ending on Friday, Aug 4, 2023

TinyPilot

Management

• Two 1:1s
• Continued working with contract manufacturer on taking over manufacturing
  • Evaluated prototype cables
  • Reviewed design changes
  • Wrote QA process
  • Reviewed instruction cards
  • Reviewed shipping boxes

Software development

• Defined some detailed bugs for Ansible to Debian refactoring
  • https://github.com/tiny-pilot/tinypilot/issues/1549
  • https://github.com/tiny-pilot/tinypilot/issues/1550
• Investigated tools to make flashing new images onto a Raspberry Pi easier
  • Obviously, this is a big pain point in TinyPilot development
  • I’m forever in search of a better way to replace the image on a Raspberry Pi without having to physically swap microSDs.
  • I tried iventoy, but it didn’t handle .img files and seemed like a weird solution overall.
  • I discovered cmprovision, which is an official Raspberry Pi tool, but it’s quite strange. It expects to manage an entire network subnet, and you have to access the interface specifically over WiFi.
  • It’s open-source, so it might be possible to adjust it to work for us.

Sales

• Finally got a hold of my Amazon sales rep and fixed issues with our Amazon listings.
• Arranged a new Voyager 2a review from a blogger.
• Recovered money from a customer who seems like they were trying to commit consumer fraud with an illegal chargeback.

mtlynch.io

• Started July retrospective

Learning Nix

• Got help getting a Nix dev environment to compile static Go binaries
• Tried to convert my whole CI pipeline to Nix
  • The issue I’m running into now is that populating the Nix environment is about 90 seconds slower per job than using a Docker container.
  • Caching the Nix store is too expensive because the cache takes too long to save and restore.
  • Using CircleCI workspaces is also pretty slow.
  • The only thing that works is mashing everything into a single job, but that means everything has to run in sequence rather than in parallel.

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.

• Started working on a feature to publish email threads with redactions.
• Moved the main.go to a cmd/stan folder to match typical Go conventions.

Misc

• Saw Barbie
  • Fun!
• Shopped for emergency car supplies (hope to not use them)
  • Based on Wirecutter suggestions
  • Ended up getting the digital flares and the window breaker