Update for the week ending on Friday, Jul 18, 2025

mtlynch.io

• Continued working on post about converting my ZFS pool from RAIDZ1 to RAIDZ2.
  • I made diagrams in Excalidraw that turned out surprisingly well.
• Started a note about delaying email responses
  • This was something I was working on for the emails chapter, but I decided it’s not really a writing suggestion.
• Fixed a broken link for OnChainKit
• Accepted a typo correction on old post
• Link to new emails sample chapter in Refactoring English self-ad
• Split README badges to separate lines

Refactoring English

• Published new excerpt, “Underused Techniques for Effective Emails”
  • It did well on Lobsters but missed on HN
• Emailed 7-8 people who purchased the book to see if they have questions.
• Tried to solicit readers to join a one-off writing workshop but couldn’t find enough takers
• Started chapter “Get to the Point”
• Imported more chapters into the ebook from the free web versions
  • “Show more pictures”
  • “Think one degree bigger”
• Updated draft to v0.2.9
• Made some small tweaks based on a casual re-read of chapters I hadn’t worked on in a few weeks.
• Fixed all the straight quotes in the book
  • Asciidoc sadly defaults to straight quotes over curly
  • Added a CI script to catch them in the future
• Added a favicon to website
• Fixed the CircleCI badge in the README
• Changed “Consulting” pages to be “Editing” and broke them into different pages
• Updated the early access pagecompleted chapters](https://github.com/mtlynch/refactoring-english-landing/pull/197)
  • Screenshot
• Updated to Hugo 0.147.5

Gleam Chat Log Parser

A toy project to teach myself Gleam. I’m trying to write parsers for my old AIM chat logs.

• Switched to a simpler parser (and started parsing timestamps in the process)
  • I originally had three stages: split the logs by whitespace and certain characters, tokenize the text, then parse the tokens.
  • I realized that there’s so little regular structure to my logs that it makes more sense to just parse all in one shot rather than try to tokenize the string.
• Switch to Nix for CI
  • It’s slower, but it means using the same environment I’m running locally.
• Added a drop_until function
  • I had a read_until that returned the characters until encountering a stop character, but I was using it in places where I didn’t actually need the string; I just wanted to skip until a particular character.
  • I realized I could create more elegant pipelines if I return a single value instead.
• Pulled remaining_graphemes into ParseState
  • So, now I’m passing around the parser’s state as a parameter and a return value for most of the parser’s functions.
  • This feels a bit like cheating functional programming because it’s essentially simulating a class with state, but maybe that’s allowed?
• Swap order of return values in plaintext parser
  • It was confusing to pass parameters in opposite order of the return values
• Added support for conversations that span multiple dates
• Added support for logs that contain multiple chat sessions
• Added support for chat sessions with seconds-level precision
• Updated tests to include chat medium

Michael’s weekly updates

• Added opengraph tags so links renders better on social media
  • Before
  • After

HN Observer

• Instead of tracking time from story submission, switched calculation to total time on front page

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 work on a feature that gives guests expiration options
  • The admin can already set a max expiration on guest uploads, but guests don’t know that their files expire, so this gives visibility to the fact that they expire and gives the guests a bit more control over when they expire.

Misc

• Scheduled more Western Mass indie founder meetups
• Experimented with Sourcegraph Amp
  • It’s pretty broken on NixOS. Any option that changes a setting seems to be broken, as I’m assuming it’s trying to write to some read-only location in my home directory.
• Fixed networking for my printer.
  • Every time I tinker with my home networking setup, I end up so frustrated and I often totally break the Internet for an hour.
  • When I’m done, I feel like a genius, though.
  • A major part of the problem is that my VLAN settings are spread across multiple places: my firewall, my managed switch, and my WiFi AP, so it’s easy for me to accidentally forget to update one or more places. It definitely makes me appreciate Unifi’s single-pane-of-glass thing.
• Bought an additional air quality monitor
  • I went with AirGradient even though I have a lot of issues with them. They seem to be the most user-hackable option even though their documentation is terrible / mostly non-existent.