Update for the week ending on Friday, Sep 18, 2026

mtlynch.io

• Published August retrospective

Refactoring English

Book

• Iterated more to clean up the print version

Book website

• Fixed redirects to HN popularity contest that accidentally broke in the migration to Surge
• Added a testimonial from Vincent Bernat
• Added support for purchasing team licenses
• Backported book improvements to the public excerpts
• Fixed low-contrast issues to meet WCAG standards
• Tweaked wording on landing page

Webhooks server

• Started working on a replacement API to Buttondown
• Refactored route registration to match my other Go projects
• Simplified failure reporting
• Added importers for historical CSVs from Kicktstarter and Stripe
• Added a SQLite database to persist transaction metadata

Feedback app

• Worked on switching feedback app authentication to custom Refactoring English webhooks server
  • Currently, it authenticates users by verifying that their email address exists as a paid subscriber on Buttondown and then sends them a magic login link.
  • I’m switching it to remove the dependency on Buttondown, so it checks my custom webhooks server instead

HN Popularity Contest

• Fixed Vincent Bernat’s page to aggregate his old domain name with his new.
• Updated preprocessing script to fix malformed URLs
  • HN weirdly allows URLs like https:///example.com (extra forward slash), so I canonicalized them to normal format
  • There were also URLs with :443 appended to the domain name, so I stripped those out.
• Used AI to update metadata for a bunch of authors
• Used AI to add more excluded domains
• Fixed author name for yoseftk.com
• Fixed a character encoding bug that could make excludes sorting non-deterministic

Mail Archiver

I’ve been meaning to take my old mail offline because it’s a lot of sensitive information to store in plaintext with a third-party vendor, but I’m deathly afraid of losing email, so I’m trying to be cautious about the move. I don’t want to delete a folder just because I think I have it archived and later find out I didn’t capture all the messages.

• Added asynchronous full-text search
  • Added exclusion for URLs and mailto links after realizing words appear in random base64-encoded values in URLs

PicoShare

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.

• Added support for protecting downloads with a passphrase
• Added icons for expiration and note labels
• Cleaned up the UI on a few pages
  • Edit page
  • File info page the same visual hierarchy as the edit page
  • Upload page the same visual hierarchy as the edit page
• Refactored the entry metadata update tests
• Removed legacy bang download routes
• Replaced ? placeholders with sql.Named in file chunk queries
• Refactored sharedSecretFromEnv to return the shared secret rather than the passphrase
• Simplify how we serve the download view
• Simplified Clock interface to single Now function
• Did a similar simplification with the space check function
• More strictly parse entry IDs at creation time

Misc

• Bought a new 2 TB SSD
  • My main NixOS SSD is 2 TB, but I keep running out of space and having to delete containers or VMs.
  • I have 20 TB of NAS storage, but I can’t run containers or VMs there.
  • I sprung $450 on a new Samsung 990 PRO and was excited to get it
  • The day I got it, I started prepping my NixOS config to install the drive and configure it to host all my VMs and Podman containers.
  • I use an LLM to help, and it says my NixOS config already shows two additional SSDs installed: a 2 TB Samsung 980 EVO and another 1 TB SSD
  • I think it must be wrong, and then I remember that when I switched from Windows to NixOS, I kept my Windows drive on hand in case I needed to retreat back to Windows.
  • I haven’t logged into the Windows OS in over a year and completely forgot about the spare SSD.
  • So, I’m returning the new SSD and I wiped my Windows SSD to use as my VM/container SSD.
  • I still have the spare 1 TB SSD that I have to figure out what to do with.
• Struggled with Wise
  • I created an account in 2021 but haven’t used it since 2022
  • I have a new vendor that wants to pay via Wise, so I logged into my old account
  • Wise put me through the new user flow, which was confusing, and I had to do a bunch of ID verification steps
  • They wouldn’t let me attach a bank account without giving them permission to dig into my private bank history via Plaid and Yodlee.
    • Usually I can decline this and do the manual deposit steps, but Wise doesn’t allow it
  • I finally tried testing a transfer into my account by depositing $5 from my credit card, and it immediately shut down my account
  • I called support, and they said I had created a duplicate account with the same email address and phone number (how can I create two accounts with the same email?!?), so they shut down my duplicate account
  • I asked how I can get back to my “original” account, and they said it was “automatically deactivated” in 2024 but didn’t explain why
  • I asked what the path forward is, and they said I could file a formal complaint, so I did. No response yet.
• Brought back logging for DB migrations
  • I accidentally dropped this when I extracted the logic to a reusable library