Update for the week ending on Friday, May 30, 2025

mtlynch.io

• Published Which New Language Should I Learn for Web Development?
• Continued working on my RAIDZ1 to RAIDZ2 post
  • And am in the process of converting now…

Refactoring English

• Sent out a draft of the content marketing chapter to readers who pre-ordered
• Held office hours

HN Observer

HN Observer is a tool I’m working on to predict the outcome of submissions to Hacker News based on past historical data.

• Added a NixOS module
  • Configured my main system so it always is running hn-observer
  • Before that, I would have to manually turn it on from my dev environment, and I’d sometimes kill it and forget to restart and miss data
• Added cleaner parsing for item ID strings

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.

• Started working on a migration to recreate all of my SQLite tables
  • I’ve been meaning to migrate to a different SQLite provider for a few months, but I keep punting on it because I feel like I need a full day to dedicate to it.
  • Instead, I’m trying to peel off chunks to make the provider switch earlier, so one thing I realized I can peel off is updating the schema. The other provider is more strict by default, but I realized I can opt-in to the same strict checks using my existing provider.
• Removed download count from the dashboard view
  • I realized it’s a relatively expensive operation. I could cache the file sizes in an extra table, but I feel like it’s easier to just save file size for the single-file view so the server never has to calculate all file sizes at once.
• Updated a bunch of tests so that I can enforce a constraint check that all upload times are after 2022-02-19 (when I published PicoShare)

ncruces/go-sqlite3

• Submitted a few documentation/testing suggestions because I keep forgetting how to use its incremental BLOB I/O feature
  • Use sql.Named to avoid magic numbers in tests
  • Linked to example of Blob I/O feature from README
• Fixed a duplicate link in the README

Misc

• Got tippable furniture anchored to wall for baby safety
• Attended a live zoom call where PJ Vogt interviewed Jonathan Goldstein