Update for the week ending on Friday, Sep 22, 2023

TinyPilot

Management

• Evaluated first article samples from contract manufacturer
  • Sent a list of issues discovered
  • There were more issues than I was expecting, but I’m hoping they’re process things we can fix.
  • As a result, I extended our lease another two months so we have secondary options for auditing the manufacturer’s work.
• Led monthly support engineering meeting.
• Wrote clearer documentation about how customer service escalates to support engineering.
• Adjusted our process for communicating with our 3PL.
  • They keep dropping the rest of the team from threads, so we’re going to use a new HelpScout mailbox.
• Had two 1:1s with teammates.
• Met with lawyer.
• Fleshed out wind-down plans for teammate on short-term employment.

Software development

• Integrated ruff into the codebase
  • It’s fast!
  • We got a 35x speedup replacing isort with ruff.
  • We replaced pyflakes with ruff even though ruff isn’t much faster, but it’s one less extra tool.
  • Replaced plyint-quotes with ruff
  • Added docstring checks with ruff
• Closed a potential bypass of TinyPilot’s license check.
• Brought back a flag to our apt update call.

Customer support

• Fired a customer who was being excessively demanding on their first order.
• Added a troubleshooting step to the audio streaming FAQ.

Sales

• Handled a customer question about a large order.
• Added refurbished devices to the TinyPilot website
• Added instructions about how to apply to TinyPilot’s affiliate program
  • We’re not looking, but sometimes we get inquiries from people who find the page through Googling, and it’s easier this way.

mtlynch.io

• Published my August retrospective
• Published notes about importing a Nix file from a URL.

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.

• Added a download history page.
  • Screenshot
• Made some error checks slightly more idiomatic in Go
• Added retries to e2e test
  • This feels hacky, but I can’t figure out any other way around it, as I’m seeing flaky tests where it doesn’t seem like the timing is wrong.

Home maintenance

• Got trees trimmed that were brushing against the side of my house
• Got my porch rescreened.
• Cleaned my dishwasher.

Misc

• Generated up to date P&L statements for my accountant.