Update for the week ending on Friday, Jun 5, 2026

mtlynch.io

• Worked on May retrospective

Refactoring English

• Published final chapter, “Respect the Reader’s Mental Bandwidth”
• Added new section “Prefer Subject-First Sentences” to “Eliminate Ambiguity” chapter
• Fixed a botched cross-reference from tutorials chapter
• Adjusted formatting of chapter summaries so they never split across page boundaries
• Tweaked website to remove language around missing chapters
• Drop editing services from website
  • Nobody had contacted me since I raised prices, so it was just noise

Book feedback app

• Got rid of the distinction between “emoji reactions” and “comments”
  • It was too complicated to model them as different types of feedback
  • I just collapsed everything to a comment, and emoji reactions are, under the covers, just comments that contain only a single character: an emoji
• Deleted dead code
• Chipped away at a giant PR to allow the user to leave comments/reactions

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).

• Mainly chipped away at implementing magic login
  • My big insight was that I could start out by skipping actual emails and pull in SMTP later
• Add comments to AuthService functions
• Added guidance to AGENTS.md about http errors
• Integrated rate limiting in the login handler
• Fixed a subtle dependency on system time
  • First, I did a hack date change to get CI green again
  • Adjusted sqlite to accept the time through dependency injection
• Fixed Dockerfile to copy correct source directories for build
• Move auth service logic to separate file
• Added rate limiting for login attempts
  • Renamed rate limiter package to not assume a particular auth method in naming
• Renamed auth service session manager mock
• Renamed email value object to EmailAddress
• Switched sqlite.New to use a typed struct instead of an arg list
• Switched to shared SQLite test helper in session tests

Go App Starter

• Fixed an issue where every build target was accidentally pulling in Playwright
• Modified dev script to skip checks on deleted files
• Switched JavaScript tooling from npm to pnpm
  • I don’t know that much about the difference, except that pnpm seems to make more sensible security choices and offers options to limit privileges more.

Pointer Brother

• Fixed cropping so you can adjust boundaries before performing the crop

Misc

• Did monthly bookkeeping
• Had a call with hardware founders