Update for the week ending on Friday, Mar 13, 2026

mtlynch.io

• Worked on my Feb 2026 retro

Refactoring English

• Had a live call with readers to go over design reviews
• Fixed bug in regional pricing that was excluding a lot of countries I meant to offer it to

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).

• Added a Background section to the design doc
• Documented the open-source license choice for the app

NixOS config

• Set up attic as a binary cache on my TrueNAS storage server
  • This was surprisingly painful
  • First, it’s a pain to make sure every host has a Nix build signing key then has a separate binary cache auth token
  • Then I had to make sure my podman sandboxes have the signing key / auth tokens
  • I feel like everyone should just share a single signing key and token since they don’t really have different trust levels, but that feels dirty somehow
  • I’m still on the fence about whether to give my Hetzner-hosted sandboxes access to the TrueNAS cache. It feels a little weird to add TrueNAS to my tailscale network just for this, but I can also theoretically lock down its exposure
• Set up dedicated Hetzner auction servers as sandboxes
  • Process is a little janky
  • Buying a Hetzner auction server is sort of instant, but it takes a few minutes, and they warn it might be days.
    • All of mine were within a few minutes
  • I thought it didn’t work because I couldn’t see my servers from my Hetzner dashboard, but it turned out they were hiding behind a non-obvious side panel
    • I configure the systems with NixOS so I can reproduce my setup on any server
    • NixOS worked well, except I hit a gotcha with disko where I didn’t think disko changes would apply until I reprovisioned, but I think switching disko to LVM wiped my server, and I had to reinstall from scratch (mostly fine with NixOS)