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

Illness

• Everyone in my house got sick with me. I think I started it and got everyone else sick.
• Fortunately, nobody’s illness was too severe.
• Still, an off week, as I spent most of the time being sick myself or caring for other sick family members.

mtlynch.io

• Published “Get xkcd Cartoons at 2x Resolution”
• Started working on September 2025 retrospective
• Pinned the netlify-cli npm package
  • Netlify completely broke their npm package for the second time in two weeks, this time for over 48 hours.
  • I figure it’s safer in terms of supply-chain issues to not use the latest version, plus I can avoid stupid things like this in the future.

Refactoring English

• Published “The Software Essays that Shaped Me”
• Worked on “Stay Positive” section of the book
• Adjusted templates so that the “purchase early access” is always on any blog post or sample chapter page
  • I was doing it manually for finer-grained control over positioning, but that made it easy to forget
  • I forgot to included it on “The Software Essays that Shaped Me,” and 15k readers saw the post and never saw the book, which is unfortunate

Michael’s weekly updates

• Pinned the netlify-cli npm package

Jellyfin Roku Client

While trying to debug an issue with streaming from Jellyfin to my Roku, I kind of fell down the rabbit hole of wanting to contribute to the client code.

• Refactored subtitle logic to use named constants instead of magic numbers
• Continued pushing for introducing unit tests
• Contributed a fix to allow bslint (the linter for Roku’s scripting language) to flag unused function paramaters

ScreenJournal

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

• Added self-improving LLM rules
  • I’m curious to see how well these will work in practice.

Misc

• Visited a corn maze
• Met with friends from Boston