Update for the week ending on Friday, Nov 8, 2024

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on “Lessons from My First Exit” post
• Worked with illustrator on cover image for my next post
• Created a convenience script for starting new monthly retro posts
• Linked to my Bluesky profile on my About page

What Got Done

Did some cleanup and simplification of What Got Done this week

• Removed support for the rich text editor
  • Apologies if anyone was using it!
  • More and more, I’ve started to narrow the scope of my open-source projects to be only the features that I personally use
  • I never used the rich text editor, and it was a fairly complex feature, and it represented about 18% of the site’s compiled code
• Fixed a race condition on the preferences page
  • It was screwing up e2e test automation
• Replace #!/bin/bash shebangs in bash scripts with a more portable version that works under NixOS
• Replace a brittle locator in a Playwright test
  • The idea is to locate elements by role or by text visible on the screen rather than by HTML attributes or CSS class names
  • And again, and again, and again
• Added a convenience script for deleting user data
• Fix handling of environment variables in upload data script
  • I’ve switched from exporting in my .env files and instead export close to where they’re used

ScreenJournal

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

• Continued working on support for reviewing TV shows in addition to just movies
  • At this point, everything is functional with reviewing TV shows. I just have to clean up the code and add more tests.
  • Got TV show reviews to show up on main index page
  • Got rendering working for TV show review pages
  • Make email notification templates work for TV show reviews
• Updated simpleauth to allow cookies without the Secure flag
  • And piped that to screenjournal so that there can be production builds that don’t require TLS
• Started writing a better intro to the project in the README
• Fix SQL generation for queries with multiple filters
• Build Docker images on every push to the main branch
  • It was configured to only run on tagged releases, which I never do, and it seems like it had broken in the interim, so I simplified to just linux/amd64 images for now
• Added sqlite to the Nix flake
• Add a note to the web UI for the first user signup that they’re the admin
• Renamed the template file for display reviews for a single movie
• Fixed a flaky login flow in e2e tests
• Get rid of the link to a movie’s TMDB page
  • It’s only supposed to work if the movie doesn’t have an IMDB entry, but I’ve never encountered a movie without one
• Rename “movie poster” alt text to just “poster”
  • We’re going to use the same alt text for both movies and TV shows, so “poster” covers both

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.

• Upgraded to CircleCI’s latest supported docker version

Misc

• Attended a local talk by Charles Marohn (author of Strong Towns) about dealing with the housing crisis
• Found local kids to do fall cleanup in my yard
• Did monthly business bookkeeping
• Installed a new GPU
  • Worked out of the box! Performance is 6x faster than my old 9-year-old GPU.
• Found a new electrician
• Requested insurance reimbursement for my wife’s breastfeeding expenses
• Re-watched infant CPR videos
  • Nothing happened, just to refresh memory