Update for the week ending on Friday, Jan 12, 2024

TinyPilot

Management

• Led monthly dev team meeting
• Led monthly support engineering meeting
• Continued fleshing out process for customer outreach
• Continued fleshing out process for manufacturing spot checks
• Had four 1:1s with team
• Met with accountants for R&D tax study for 2023
• Paid estimated state and federal taxes for 2023Q4
• Paid 2023Q4 sales tax

Software development

• Reviewed changes to our internal microSD integrity checking script

Sales

• Met with a large engineering firm customer
• Started exploring ads on EthicalAds
• Began sponsoring HomeNetworkGuy
  • Just text posts for now. We’ll see how they perform and then maybe switch to graphical ads.
• Increased renewal price on TinyPilot Pro from $79/month to $99/month
  • A customer requested a discount on our $79/month price, and I realized I felt like $79 was too low to begin with. It’s the first price increase since we launched TinyPilot Pro in 2021.
• TinyPilot had its biggest single-day sales revenue of all time at $16.9k

mtlynch.io

• Published December 2023 retrospective
• Started sixth year annual review post

isitketo

• A reader emailed in a correction to an article, so I dusted off the repo and got it to build again under Nix
  • Added a Nix flake and upgraded to node.js 18.x
  • Upgraded to Gridsome 0.7.23 (the last ever version)
  • Upgraded to Prettier 3.x
  • Updated the Heinz Sugar-free Ketchup article to say that it now uses stevia, not sucralose

Misc

• Got a COVID booster
  • And then whined for a couple days about soreness
• Brought my car in to address a computer issue that caused a factory recall
• Continued working on German citizenship application
• Recovered an Ethereum wallet I found from 2018
  • It had eight Ethereum private keys I didn’t remember creating
  • All were empty, zero transactions. Oh well!
• Adjusted retention policy for Restic backups and reduced my storage footprint by about 60% and sped up my nightly backup by about 10x
  • Before
  • After
• Played with ArchiveBox
  • It’s super neat!
  • It’s like a self-hostable Internet Wayback Machine
  • It can save even JS-heavy websites as PDF, PNG, or as a single HTML file (somehow embedding images into the HTML file)