Update for the week ending on Friday, Jan 3, 2025

mtlynch.io

• Started my December retrospective
• Published my notes for The Case for Open Borders
• Integrated my book cover into the self-ad for Refactoring English

Refactoring English

• Published the first chapter: “Rules for Writing Software Tutorials”
• Continued working on passive voice chapter
• Added support for “Discuss on…” links at the bottom of posts
• Got opengraph working for Twitter cards
• Fixed other opengraph properties that I discovered were broken when I started sharing the post on social media
• Had a call with a tech publisher about potentially working together
  • My plan is to self-publish the ebook and then after that, see if it makes sense to partner with a publisher
• Started writing chapter on design docs

fusion

fusion is an open-source RSS reader I found when looking for an RSS aggregator to host on my NixOS system. I like that it’s written in Go and uses SQLite as a backend, so it’s pretty easy to self-host. The maintainer is very responsive to PRs as well.

• Simplified password auth logic
• Switched the base Docker image to Alpine Linux
• Made config settings read-only after loading
• Avoided swallowing an error when creating a new session
• Changed reading order to order of publication
• Removed a dead script option

ScreenJournal

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

• Added a users page
  • Screenshot

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.

• Made a second attempt at switching to a database driver that supports SQLite Blob I/O from Go
  • I had tried this in the past but ran into several issues and lost motivation to keep debugging it
  • The main insight I had returning to it was that I could use Blob I/O for writing files but keep reading files the inefficient way
  • When users run into issues, it seems to be with the write step rather than the read step
  • I also realized that my previous write logic was overly complicated
    • I implemented an io.Writer that would write to the SQLite database in chunks, but I realized I don’t even need to implement io.Writer because I know the full file size up front and I can just write it to the database in exactly the chunks I want without worrying about buffers that need to be flushed
• Figured out how to deploy a desktop GUI to a Fly.io server
  • I wanted a way to test the new upload functionality using large files and a fast connection, and my home uplink sucks
• Switched to a different API for reading files from the database
• Use a FileSize type
  • This prevents file sizes from being 0, which PicoShare doesn’t support
• Make chunk size a uint64
• Protect against a race condition in tokenToDB
• Fix some SQLite integrity issues that mattn/sqlite3 for some reason never flagged:
  • Delete references to entries before deleting entries
  • Delete references to guest links before deleting the link
  • Insert NULL instead of empty string for guest links
• Don’t depend on system time in file expiration unit tests
  • This started failing on 2025-01-01 because it was hardcoded as a future date. How was I to know that it would eventually become a past date?
• Defined a function that I only used in one place as a local variable
• Removed unnecessary string casts
• Make serve-docker work even if .env.dev isn’t present
• Log how many rows were affected in a database purge task
• Fixed a Docker warning about mixing case
• Improve documentation on getChunkSize
  • I forgot what it was doing, so I had to capture what I re-learned

Misc

• Got my AirGradient air quality monitor connected to my local network again
  • I had shut off the server it was connected to and hadn’t gotten around to reflashing it with the new server address
  • Set up email alerts when air quality drops (PM2.5 goes above 20)