Update for the week ending on Friday, Sep 1, 2023

TinyPilot

Management

• Reviewed sample AC adapters from contract manufacturer
• Wrote guidance for how the support eng team should manage the task queue.
• Checked with contract manufacturer about an RMA process post-transition.

Software development

• Put the final pieces in place for eliminating Ansible from TinyPilot’s stack
  • We’ve been doing this for about 16 months, and it’s involved a lot of hard work.
  • The result is that the install process is much simpler and completes in about 30-60 seconds instead of 4 to 5 minutes.
  • Last changes
    • Delete Ansible from installation process
    • Install ustreamer-launcher without Ansible
    • Install uStreamer without Ansible
    • Install Janus without Ansible
    • Install yq without Ansible
    • Populate the TC358743 EDID file without Ansible
    • Update e2e tests
• Fixed a Windows + Firefox bug on the Dedicated Window feature.
• Reviewed / co-authored a speedup to building our Debian packaging using CircleCI’s ARM executors
• Reviewed an experimental build of TinyPilot that keeps the root partition in read-only mode.
• Reviewed paste overlay dialog feature

Sales

• Answered feature requests from a customer considering a large order.

mtlynch.io

• Started writing my August retrospective
• Almost finished my blog post on 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.

• Got PicoShare to compile down to a single binary
  • Added static files to the binary using Go’s embed.FS.
  • Updated CircleCI so that it builds binaries for AMD64, ARM64, and ARMv7 on every release and attaches them to the Github release
    • I screwed up the config a lot, and it took several tries before I got it working correctly
  • Disabled an unused sqlite extension so that we can build with static linking
  • Made sure that we’re building with CGO enabled
• Refactored my end-to-end tests so I no longer rely on hacky data-testid attributes
  • The new test logic interacts with the page using attributes that real users see, so the tests better represent real world usage.
• Fixed a bug in picking the correct clipboard representation when there are multiple options
  • Added unit tests, too, but this turned out to be really hard.
    • Mocha needs my package.json file to be declared as type: module, but Playwright requires my package.json to not be declared as type: module.
      • I had to reorganize things to give Playwright its own package.json file

What Got Done

• Tried to use Cachix to speed up Nix in CI, but I couldn’t get it working.
  • Submitted two small bugfixes to Cachix’s docs.

Home maintenance

• Met with tree trimmer
  • My arbor vitaes are starting to brush against my house
• Met with a handyman about re-screening my porch
  • They had to remove the screens from the porch when they repainted it, and it’s been surprisingly difficult finding someone to put new screens up.

Misc

• Asked my accountant a bunch of questions that had been piling up.
• Booked travel for a conference.