Update for the week ending on Friday, Feb 23, 2024

TinyPilot

Management

• Continued preparing financial documents for TinyPilot
• Started reviewing a new contract for TinyPilot
• Continued working with team and manufacturer on transferring our return process to the manufacturer
• Had 1:1 with a teammate

Software development

• Continued documenting TinyPilot’s release process
  • I realized I’d been kind of “cheating” by privately making last-minute ship/release decisions when we encounter bugs during pre-release testing, and I’ve never defined the decision-making process
• Worked on improving TinyPilot’s release scripts
• Worked on improving TinyPilot’s static IP feature
• Supported release tasks for 2.6.3 release
• Moved Ansible role for internal testing laptop to a team repository
• Started transitioning the team LogPaste server to Fly.io
• Updated team PicoShare server to 1.4.2

mtlynch.io

• Published my January retrospective

eth-zvm

eth-zvm is an experimental implementation of the Ethereum virtual machine in pure Zig. I probably won’t implement the whole thing, but it’s a fun way to play around with Zig on a project where Zig does seem to actually be the right tool.

• Added performance benchmarks of my partial implementation vs. the official Go implementation
• Implemented returning values greater than a single byte
• Implemented the PUSH32 opcode
• Implemented the ADD opcode
• Added a benchmark for an Ethereum program that counts to 1,000 by 1
  • The official Go implementation blows mine away by a factor of 20, but I haven’t tried to optimize mine for performance yet

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.

• Improved error messages when requests to server fail

Misc

• Installed dropbear on my Proxmox VM server so I can decrypt the server remotely
  • I was doing this with a TinyPilot, but it required a TinyPilot to be connected to the server whenever it booted
  • It was surprisingly easy. I find most things that mess with Linux’s boot fail disastrously like 20% of the time and have lots of undocumented steps, but this worked well
• Fixed CI for my ZFS encrypted backup scripts