Update for the week ending on Friday, May 1, 2026

mtlynch.io

• Started working on blog post about a college that sent me spam

Refactoring English

• Published “Improving Your Writing with AI” chapter
• Tried to fix paying customers whose email addresses Buttondown labeled as “undeliverable”
  • About half got fixed and half just have email addresses that don’t receive email
• Worked on “Minimize Cognitive Load” chapter
• Started working on design doc for feedback app for the HTML version of the book
• Modified asciidoc to render the HTML version with separate files for each chapter
• Improved formatting for blockquotes in HTML output
• Normalized image sizes in HTML/epub output

ScreenJournal

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

• Continued tweaking the migration to the new simpleauth
  • It’s still pretty complicated, but it’s simpler than what was there before
• Make handlers depend on sqlite.Store directly
  • I always like keeping cross-package dependencies scoped to interfaces, but I got feedback from an LLM that in this case, it was pointless because the interface perfectly mirrored the implementation and wasn’t buying me anything.
• Break the handlers dependency on raw DB pointer
  • There’s awkward wiring to make it possible for parallel e2e tests to use the same app but multiple databases, so the tests don’t taint each other.
• Renamed SQLite store ctx field to db
  • I don’t know how I started doing this, but it never made sense to me and is extra confusing because ctx is usually the name for Context
• Converted handlers.New to use a params struct
  • The params list grew too long, and it was too confusing what field was what at the callsite.
• Switched to memdb for ephemeral SQLite test databases
  • I was using a shared cache before, but apparently it’s bad

Grosiree

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

• Added a warning if the user tries to add an item with no section.
• Make the auto-complete also populate the item’s section field
• Fixed autocomplete in grocery item edit forms

MeshCore

• My unit tests from six months ago finally got merged.
• Started working on new unit tests for malformed advert packets

Timelinize

Timelinize is a neat project I discovered by Matt Holt (creator of Caddy) that creates a web UI for data you export from services like Google, Twitter, and Facebook.

• Fixed a CI misconfiguration
• Added unit tests for googlevoice importer

NixOS config

• Started experimenting with OpenCode
  • For some reason, it just dies silently in my podman container
  • It works in my VM sandbox, but that’s slightly more of a pain to use.
• Experimented with VibeVoice (speech to text with speaker identification)
  • It’s interesting, but it seems to require a lot of tuning to not exhaust GPU memory and die mid-job.

rss-archiver

rss-archiver is a tool I built for saving podcast feeds locally.

• Added support for downloading feed and episode images
• Stripped parentheses from output filenames
• Treat apostrophe characters as separators in episode names
  • So Conan O'Brien turns into Conan-O-Brien whereas it was previously Conan-OBrien

Misc

• Fixed GOROOT in the nix flake of my go app starter
• Experimented with Microsoft VibeVoice
  • Pretty good results so far just on my home GPU.