Update for the week ending on Friday, Jul 31, 2026

Refactoring English

• Worked with a reader on blog article feedback
• Bumped book version to 0.9.10

Book

• Started working on chapter on titles
• Improved my invoice generator to support customers in Europe
• Made a dedicated chapter for headings
• Polished the chapters on emails, release announcements, and tutorials

Website

• Updated guidance on discounted editing page
• Answered a frequently asked question on the website about a print version

Feedback app

• Let the author mark an emoji reaction as seen so it doesn’t show up as unreviewed feedback.

Scraper bot attack

• Gave information to Netlify support, who have been useless so far.
  • The response was like a 2023-era LLM that told me to change settings that don’t exist and couldn’t be bothered to look up any details specific to my account
• Improved my Bunny IPs -> Netlify block script slightly

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).

mtlynch/little-moments

• Create a writable temporary directory in the production image
• Point .env.example’s Litestream config at Backblaze B2
• Redirect signed-in users from replayed magic links
• Scoped down a bunch of Nix build targets
  • e2e tests
  • frontend
  • Go formatting
  • Go tests
  • JavaScript tests
  • pnpm dependencies
  • trailing newline check
  • trailing whitespace check
• Simplified the docker-entrypoint script
• Dropped implicit fields from Litestream configuration

Mikeville

This is a game I tried vibe coding a few weeks ago. It worked well when it was single-player 100% JavaScript, but the LLMs failed to make progress when I switched it to multiplayer with Phoenix. I kinda gave up but a friend suggested I try again with the latest frontier models turned up to xhigh, and it worked! The main bottleneck was figuring out a way for the LLMs to run e2e tests themselves to verify behavior. Before, they kept giving me incorrect results, but now it’s mostly always correct.

• Added support for password protection
  • And made it so you can send links with the password embedded in the link
• Made it possible for players to choose their names
• Added in-game help screen
• Added a NixOS module for the game
• Added support for in-game chat
• Added full cow support

HN Observer

HN Observer is a tool I’m working on to predict the outcome of submissions to Hacker News based on historical data.

• Kind of fixed a bug in rendering the front page
  • I hadn’t touched it in about 6 months, so I let the latest frontier models take a crack at it.
• Moved the repo from GitHub to my private Gitea Cloud instance
• Backported a bunch of repo-level improvements from other projects

NixOS config

• Fixed the NixOS config on my laptop
  • WiFi and USB devices weren’t working on the latest NixOS rebuild, but it’s a laptop I don’t use often.
  • I eventually realized it was the kernel module lock I added to my common Nix folder, which was blocking the OS from loading the kernel module for WiFi and my USB device.
  • This kernel module locking thing keeps biting me

Misc

• Co-hosted Indie Founders Western Mass meetup
• Tried messing with Gitea Cloud
  • So far, kind of unimpressed
  • Monitoring is bad. Just point in time snapshots of CPU/RAM. Where are my Grafana dashboards?
  • CI/CD doesn’t seem to auto-scale at all. My builds consistently completed in about 2m, but when I ran 6 in parallel, they ballooned to 30m+ each, so I was billed for like 3 hours of CI build time when it seems like they would have completed in 12 minutes had they run serially.
  • I reached out to support, and we’re going on two business days of no response.
  • It is fast, but when I have multiple Gitea Actions jobs running, it slows down, which makes me suspect that they’re using my Gitea instance to run Actions jobs.
  • I’m so fed up with Codeberg and desperate to move elsewhere
• Emailed StaticHost to ask about moving there
  • Never heard back