Update for the week ending on Friday, Mar 15, 2024

TinyPilot

Management

• Continued preparing reports for TinyPilot
• Finished internal guide to writing security advisories
• Sent guide to writing release announcement blog posts out for review
• Continued working with our manufacturer on transferring our RMA process

Software development

• Ported the TinyPilot website from Firebase to Netlify
  • I’d wanted to do this for a while because, in general, Google is a pain to deal with, but we ran into something that was easier to do with Netlify than Firebase, so it felt time.
  • Stupidly, I did this at 9am on a Thursday, so users saw TLS warnings for a few minutes.
    • I still don’t totally understand why this happened. I expected that if DNS caches still had the Firebase address, Firebase would continue happily serving its copy of the site with a valid TLS cert, but somehow, changing the DNS entries seemed to invalidate Firebase’s TLS cert immediately.
    • As a workaround, I configured Firebase to redirect to a tinypilotkvm.com subdomain that I’d created the day before for testing, so it was a little weird, but better than users seeing a TLS error when they tried to hit the sales site.
    • After an hour or so, everything seemed back to normal
  • Netlify’s config is in .toml format, whereas Firebase was .json, so it’s very nice being able to add inline comments to explain why configuration options are the way they are.
• Deleted a bunch of obsolete redirects from the TinyPilot website
• Ported some website E2E tests from Cypress to Playwright

Sales

• Resumed sales for refurbished devices
• Tested reaching out to users who had abandoned their carts
  • One reply said he purchased on Amazon, but seemed warm to the outreach

mtlynch.io

• Started working on February 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.

• Started implementing support for PC opcode

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.

• Switched to named SQL parameters instead of using ? placeholders

Misc

• Cleaned dishwasher
• Accidentally lost hot water for the weekend
  • Hot water boiler wouldn’t turn on
  • It broke Saturday afternoon, and our heating company wasn’t open until Monday
  • I was so desperate to get back hot water that I called the minute they opened Monday
  • Receptionist: “Did you run out of oil?”
  • I had forgotten to check my oil levels for the past few months, and I reached 0.