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

TinyPilot

Management

Had three 1:1s with teammates
Arranged R&D tax study for 2023
Complained to the IRS about the fact that I have to pay $6k for a tax study every year to run a small business that depends on software
Planned how to handle in-limbo devices
- We did a minor revision on the Voyager 2a in November with the switch to the contract manufacturer, but now when we get returns from pre-revision, it’s confusing what to do with them.
- We decided to treat even brand new ones as “refurbished” and only sell them that way
Picked a strategy for virtual mailboxes as an office alternative

Software development

Ported an end-to-end test on the website from Cypress to Playwright
- Our website’s end-to-end tests take 2m15s on Cypress, and I suspect I could bring them down to about 45s if I port them to Playwright
- The main difference is that Playwright natively supports parallel tests, whereas Cypress is all serial in the open-source version

Office move-out

Moved office PoE rack switch from my office to my home rack

mtlynch.io

Continued working on my next Zig blog posts

WhatGotDone

Started de-SPAifying the web app
- In the past few years, I’ve really regretted SPAs and much prefer the simplicity of traditional web apps
- I’m trying to reimplement Vue components as native HTML custom elements
- Reimplemented Vue UsernameLink component as a native HTML custom element
- Inlined the Vue PageFooter component into index.html
Created better error messages for invalid email addresses
Refactored user bio parse tests
Renamed .env files to follow more conventional style
Got rid of npm serve script
- In general, I’ve decided to stop using npm scripts and just use bash scripts
Added Litestream to my Nix environment
- I was surprised that someone is building Litestream packages for Nix! Up to date too!
Change modd script so that it prints compiler errors
Updated Playwright to 1.40.1

WanderJest

Tried llamafile + LLaVA 1.5 in a cloud VM
- My idea was to try to use LLaVA as a way to parse information from show posters like this one
  - I’m not keen on paying for any of the solutions available because I’m not crazy about any of the paid providers out there, but I’m excited about open-source models.
  - It didn’t really work. The accuracy was pretty bad, as it would hallucinate about 30% of the information it reported.
  - It was neat to try, and it was very fast to spin up. Maybe it’ll be there in another year or so.

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.

Updated random package to take advantage of Go 1.21

Misc

Did monthly bookkeeping
Scheduled the next Indie Founders Western Mass virtual meetup