Update for the week ending on Friday, Jan 30, 2026

mtlynch.io

Worked on my year 8 as a bootstrapped founder post
Fixed my explanation of twisted pair vs. fiber in my rack server post
Clarified compatibility of single mode and multimode fiber in my rack server post
Adjusted my wordword CI job to print commands to stdout
- It was failing and I couldn’t figure out why without echoing the commands

Refactoring English

Added notes on how I use AI tools
Added an HTML version for excerpts I share with subscribers
Added more CI checks for NixCI
Added an undocumented HTTP header to bypass firewall on Buttondown API

Stream Preserve

Stream Preserve is a web app for recording video in a situation where your phone may be stolen or destroyed in the middle of a recording. It’s just an experiment so far.

Got video recording to work on desktop and on Firefox Android
- Had to work around an odd bug in Firefox
Added support for capturing video from partial uploads
Added video thumbnails
Made it so that videos auto-download to the client device after recording stops
- That way, you have a safe copy if something goes wrong with the server-side copy

Little Moments

Little Moments is an open-source web app I’m working on to replace the current family photo sharing app (TinyBeans) I used (which I strongly dislike).

Continued working on design doc
- Added a D2 architecture diagram (which AI is decently good at making, though it took me about 90 mins)

python3_seed

Switched to uv to manage Python dependencies
Replaced isort with ruff
Updated to coverage to 7.13.1
Fixed my bash scripts shebangs to use a more portable version

resticpy

Gave feedback on a third-party PR
Linked to my commit messages guide for PR descriptions
Linked to the Google Python Style Guide in CONTRIBUTING
Tried switching from yapf to pyink
- YAPF seems no longer maintained, and pyink is a light fork of the more popular Black tool
- But it seems like pyink has a non-configurable line length of 88, which feels too disruptive

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.

Set up performance tests to test different performance improvements
- I thought this was going to be easy for an AI agent but it turned out to be a huge pain
- My goal was to run PicoShare in constrained RAM scenarios and measure the impact of different performance improvements
- I wanted to use VMs to constrain RAM because I’ve tried using Docker in the past, and Docker seems to not be
Added a note to flake.nix about nixhub
- This is mainly to help AI agents understand it
Align mobile navbar items with Upload button text
Consolidated .clinerules into AGENTS.md
- I’ve officially abandoned Cline for terminal-based agents
Fixed path to playwright artifacts on CI
Investigated whether I can replace the gorilla package with native Go muxer
- It seems more complicated than I expected
Replaced modd with air
- air seems more actively maintained and easier to configure
Updated CSS to use a consistent breakpoint
Switched to crypt/rand instead of math/rand
Added CSS nesting
Refactored theme colors into CSS variables

go-app-starter

go-app-starter is my template project for Go web apps.

I had a lot of improvements I’d discovered in other Go proejcts, so I backported them all to my template so I’d have a single canonical place to reference them, plus discovered a few more.
Added a nix build target for the Docker build
Added a note about nixhub to flake.nix
Switched generateRandomString to use crypto/rand
- I don’t know why it wasn’t using crypto/rand before
- It probably doesn’t matter, but it’s one of those cases where there’s no reason not to, and I might as well just for the sake of not wondering if there’s an issue
Moved ESLint ignores to eslint.config.js
Moved Store interface to handler package
- I was accidentally letting the implementation define the interface
Removed CircleCI config - Continuing to migrate most projects to NixCI
Removed .env.dev from serve script
- It didn’t exist in the boilerplate project
Replaced .clinerules with AGENTS.md
Replaced Replace gorilla/mux with net/http mux
Replaced modd with air
Simplified Litestream install in Dockerfile

Grosiree

Grosiree is a shared grocery list web app I’m making with my wife to show her how vibecoding works.

Added inputs for item, quantity, notes, and section
Added auto-complete for inputs and sections

NixOS config

Added a check for Lua syntax on commit
- It prevents me from applying an invalid Awesome WM config early
Adjust SSH config so that I don’t offer all SSH identies to all hosts by default

LLM sandbox

Adjusted the sandbox config so that it doesn’t share the .venv directory with the sandbox container
- I’m pretty sure this was messing up my .venv because I think the container points to a nix store that differs from the host, though I haven’t tested it rigorously.
Wrote a custom opener for
Fixed Firefox behavior in Awesome WM
- By default, when I open a URL from a non-browser, it opens in the last Firefox window I touched, which is often in a different desktop
- I vibecoded a custom URL handler that always opens in the current desktop
Formatted everything with alejandra and enabled a pre-commit check for formatting
Split up my home.nix file into a few separate files
- My VS Code, SSH, and git settings had gotten large and unwieldy within the single file, so it’s easier to manage each in dedicated files

Misc

Reported a security vulnerability to a utility provider
Played around with fuzzing VLC
Emailed an old coworker
Checked out the new TinyPilot Voyager 3