Update for the week ending on Friday, Feb 9, 2024

TinyPilot

Management

• Prepared financial reports and tax documents for TinyPilot
• Started documenting the parts of the TinyPilot Pro release process that I’ve been doing myself
  • I had felt like I eliminated a lot of the Michael-only parts, but I’m challenging myself this release to remove myself and see if it can happen without me, and I’m realizing a lot was still silo’ed in my head.
• Continued working on RMA process
• Led dev team meeting
• Led support engineering meeting
• Had two 1:1s with teammates

Software development

• Adjusted our Playwright tests to increase parallelism in tests on the TinyPilot website
  • Weirdly, they all worked fine in CI when it was in the PR, but after we merged it, the tests all started timing out
• Adjusted the UI text slightly in our new static IP dialog
• Weighed in on release architecture discussions
• Added dev-internal instructions for viewing our UI style guide
• Reviewed improvements to our microSD integrity check scripts
• Added an optional Nix flake for development work on our update server
• Documented how to manually test new static IP feature in our e2e tests

Customer support

• Reviewed changes to a boot from USB tutorial
• Reviewed changes to our factory reset page

Sales

• Offered refurbished devices on sale again
  • There seems to be a lot less enthusiasm from customers because this time around, they’re a revision behind, so I had to list all the reasons why they’re not as good as our retail versions.
• Switched mailing list from EmailOctopus to Buttondown
  • EmailOctopus has been stagnant or degrading in many respects, whereas I’ve been impressed with Justin Duke’s work and his product
• Ordered more of a critical part
  • But then it ended up a bit of a snafu
  • Still working on smoothing out the process for this part

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on my six-year retrospective

ScreenJournal

ScreenJournal is basically Goodreads, but for TV and movies. Or letterboxd, but focused on small communities.

• Refactored session handling into its own package
• Realized that clients should define interfaces, not the packages themselves
  • https://github.com/mtlynch/screenjournal/pull/250
  • https://github.com/mtlynch/screenjournal/pull/252
  • https://github.com/mtlynch/screenjournal/pull/253
• Updated to the latest version of simpleauth

simpleauth

SimpleAuth is my attempt to roll my own simple auth library in Go because I don’t like any of the auth libraries that are available.

• Dropped the Authenticator interface
  • Clients should be defining the interface they want to use.
  • Ditto for SessionManager
• Changed semantics of backing store to accept a database interface rather than a database filename

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.

• Show version information within the app
• Dropped support for DB vacuuming
  • It’s not a feature I ever wanted, but I got requests for it, and it seemed trivial to implement.
  • It ended up causing a bunch of bugs I never felt like investigating, so I’ve just dropped support for it entirely.
• Realized that clients should define interfaces, not the packages themselves
  • https://github.com/mtlynch/picoshare/pull/535
  • https://github.com/mtlynch/picoshare/pull/536
• Renamed environment files to the more conventional .env.* format
• Fixed Nix config for Go
• Added Playwright to Nix flake
• Added sqlite to Nix flake

Misc

• Did monthly bookkeeping.
• Ranted about some of my Go opinions.
• Tried to fix a bug in AirGradient but the author did a surprise whole-project rewrite
  • And the rewrite still has the bug, but I’m much less motivated to bother now.
• Booked conference travel