Update for the week ending on Friday, Aug 15, 2025

mtlynch.io

Sent out a survey about interest in each chapter
- Way bigger response this time than any other time
- Previous chapters, I’d get only 1-2 responses when I asked for feedback, this time, I’ve already gotten 79 responses in five hours.
Tweaked the blog chapters slightly

Spent several frustrating hours this week trying to get the AirGradient One to run custom firmware and send data to my local server.

The challenges
- They hide the documentation about how to compile and reflash the software.
- The last tagged release isn’t really the latest production release.
- The software itself is buggy and messy.
- They totally rewrote the software since the last time I got this working.
- The software assumes you’re talking to an AirGradient server, so customizing that to a local server is very off the happy path.
It turned out that they now do document how to compile and flash, but they don’t link the instructions in the documentation, so I submitted a fix to make the flashing instructions more discoverable
Wrote a test server to implement the server side of the AirGradient dashboard
- The problem is that the client insists on TLS, even though the connection to the client is plaintext HTTP.
Wrote a Nix flake so I can do nix run .#flash and it will reflash the current code.
- I originally could only get this working in VMs, which would lose the serial connection, so finally getting it working on my main dev machine was a big improvement.
I think I finally have it consistently flashing.
Fixed JSON example in /config docs

Finished migration to DuckDB
- Removed all references to sqlite and litestream
- Ported SQLite tests to DuckDB
Added the Nix build to CI
Matched the playwright version in CI to Nix
Simplified the release binaries step to only build for amd64
- My Go DuckDB library seems unfriendly to ARM
Tried automatically showing moderation events
- For example, when a post is manually upranked or downranked
- It doesn’t quite work yet.
Updated to go 1.24.5
Updated to Playwright 1.54.0
Fixed the vendor hash of the NixOS module
Got all the time displays to use NY timezone consistently

Fix the shutdown notice route so it doesn’t return a 404
Now that I’ve sunset it, it keeps creating maintenance headaches
- This week, data backups stopped due to a litestream bug
Updated the download-prod-db to work with the latest version of flyctl
Updated version of litestream in Nix flake

Had a call with another blogger
Gave two bloggers feedback about blog drafts
Refactored my NixOS config so that I can update Firefox independently (faster) than my other nixpkgs packages
Did monthly bookkeeping