Update for the week ending on Friday, Feb 7, 2025

mtlynch.io

• Published “My Seventh Year as a Bootstrapped Founder”
• Published “The Cline AI Assistant is Mesmerizing”
• Published “Install NixOS on a Free Oracle Cloud VM”
  • This took a lot of trial and error to get working.
• Worked on January retro
• Removed trailing tweets / skeets from old posts
  • They spur re-sharing right after a post goes up, but they don’t need to stick around for weeks later
• Updated to latest markdownlint

wordword

• Added self-hosted Woodpecker CI
  • I had to figure out how to run NixOS on the Oracle Cloud VM first
  • From there, I had to figure out how to install Woodpecker CI on NixOS
  • Eventually, I got it working, and it’s kind of neat! Except I wouldn’t trust it with any production secrets because I can’t monitor and secure it like a proper CI solution.
• Added precompiled binaries
  • Zig makes cross-compiling super easy
• Added a --verbose flag
  • It runs so fast, I wanted to check that it’s actually scanning all the files I expect
• Reduced copying of words
  • This was like a 100x speedup
• Split dupe checker into a dedicated word tokenizer and dupe checker
  • Much cleaner this way, as tokenizing is so different from dupe checking
• Added a --version flag
• Used it to find errors in jmduke.com
• Fixed a bug where directives were accidentally making false positives
• Added a summary to the output

Refactoring English

• Experimented with different solutions for authoring in markdown and publishing to HTML + PDF
  • Pollen looks neat, but it seems like a lot to learn
  • I tried pandoc but it felt so hard to get it to convert my pages to PDF at all, and then they looked awful, so I feel like I need something that works on content before it’s already rendered as HTML
  • I’m looking at AsciiDoc and mdBook next

Exploding Servers

Exploding servers is a personal utility I use to automatically provision VMs with a fixed timeout so I can use them for quick experiments without having to remember to delete them.

• Created a NixOS module so it’s always running on my local system
  • This was a big source of friction before, as I always had to remember how to launch it in the past
• Embedded static files in the binary
• Defaulted to renting VMs by the hour, as Scaleway rounds up to the hour anyway

Misc

• Did monthly bookkeeping
  • Updated my Chase beancount importer to support international wire transactions and then refactored transaction handling
• Started setting up baby cam
  • I was expecting open-source NVR software to be way easier than it is
  • ZoneMinder is still a bunch of perl scripts, and it’s really confusing
  • I couldn’t even figure out how to install frigate
  • I might try Shinobi, but it’s not packaged for NixOS, which is a bummer