Update for the week ending on Friday, Mar 29, 2024

TinyPilot

Management

• One 1:1 with teammate
• Continued fleshing out our new RMA process
• Finished documenting release tasks based on last release
• Deactivated an old mailing list

Software development

• Migrated TinyPilot’s LogPaste server from AWS Lightsail to Fly.io
  • It was our only AWS service, so it made more sense to have it in Fly.io instead
  • Seems like it was a smooth transition
• Updated CircleCI context settings to match our release process

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on homelab server rack post

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.

• Made a tiny compiler
  • It’s super tiny, and barely a compiler
  • I realized that my benchmark test cases were hard to read as bytecode, so I decided to store them in mnemonic EVM format instead
  • I couldn’t find a simple mnemonic to bytecode command-line tool, and it seemed simple enough (I later found one, but it’s fun to have mine)
  • So, mine is not 100% rigorous in that it will compile invalid mnemonic like PUSH1 RETURN, but it’s good enough for my needs.
• Adjusted behavior so that we read all the bytecode into RAM first
  • This would have made Why does an extraneous build step make my Zig app 10x faster? a moot point, as the timer doesn’t start until all the input is read.
• Switched to reading from a fixed buffer instead of an I/O reader.
  • I realized I/O didn’t make any sense because EVM can do random access to different parts of bytecode
• Added support for PC opcode
• Added support for STOP opcode
  • And then realized a simpler way of doing it
• Switched to importing opcode values from evmc
• Allow benchmarking script to recognize other time units from evm
• Refactored CircleCI to use shared executor definitions

LogPaste

• Made a bunch of small fixes to deployment and Litestream components so that I could deploy on Fly.io with Litestream

Misc

• Paid 2023 estimated taxes
• Met with lawyer
• Tried to give away old technical books, but not much luck so far
• Set up systemd services for my Grafana server
  • I was manually spinning up services, but they kept dying when I’d terminate the session, and I’d been putting off something cleaner
• Fixed a broken link in base.org’s contributing guidelines.
• Submitted a README fix to evmc