Update for the week ending on Friday, Oct 23, 2026

mtlynch.io

• Published my September 2026 retro
• Fixed the markdownlint version command
  • The old one was returning a non-zero exit code
• Fixed a typo on my “Buy the book” button
• Refactored logic for delta cells so I can use them in any post

Refactoring English

Book

• Refactored style so that the good and bad example callouts share more code
  • Previously, it was possible for the styles to go out of sync because they defined things like padding and margins independently
• Worked on improving the spacing between headers, paragraphs, and callouts

Feedback app

• Backfilled custom user IDs in the database
• Updated the web UI to show custom user IDs alongside legacy IDs
• Adjusted SQLite table rules so that custom user IDs can’t be NULL
• Switched to Google UUID library instead of reimplementing UUID logic by hand
• Use build tags to avoid building test-only login flow in production builds
• Use the modeltest.MustCreate pattern more widely

Website

• Requested the surge.sh make their redirects work more similarly to Netlify
  • They did almost immediately
  • I didn’t realize the repo was open-source, so I contributed two PRs:
    • parse the HTTP redirect code in ROUTERS more rigorously
    • stop yonder.parse from swallowing errors
• Updated discuss links for the design docs chapter to point to the most active discussions

Backend

• Moved the repo from Codeberg to Codefloe

NixOS config

• Made lots of improvements to my AI agent sandbox
  • Agents can now publish to any Forgejo server where they have credentials, not just Codefloe
  • Adjusted the Claude review skill so say that the worker should converge on fixes, not just collect feedback
  • Improved diagnostic messages when a sandbox fails to start for a directory
  • Allow force pushes to bot-owned branches
  • Make the OpenCode web UI accessible over my home network
  • Support shared browser sessions with agents where the browser is still in the sandbox
• Configured my spare 1 TB SSD as encrypted swap space
  • It wasn’t doing anything, and I’ve sometimes exhausted the 64 GB of swap on my main SSD

Pointer Brother

• Ported the repo from Codeberg to Codefloe
• Added support for rotating images by 90 degrees and arbitrary amounts

Misc

• Started working on a bugfix to Cyrus IMAPd that affects imapgoose syncing on Fastmail
• Complained to Ente about violating FairScan’s software license
  • Ente added attribution
• Switched from Gmail to Fastmail as my primary calendar
  • I initially messed up by doing Gmail as a read-only link, which meant I had to keep hopping back to Google to make changes to anything.
  • I discovered you can share a Google Calendar directly with Fastmail in read-write mode, so that lets me edit old events but create all new ones on Fastmail
• Bought a full-length rack shelf
  • I’ve had it on my to-do list for like 3 years to go to a hardware store and buy wood sized to the dimensions of my rack as like a “rack hat” so I can put stuff on it.
    • I eventually gave in to the fact that I’m never going to do this,
• Created Grafana dashboards for my to-do list and inbox
  • I find it motivating to be able to see a graph of the impact I’m having on both
  • I still need to get better at not letting overdue tasks accrue, but I think the dashboard is helpful motivation
• Made some changes to mitigate risks from eMurdha and php2shell.