Update for the week ending on Friday, Nov 6, 2026

mtlynch.io

• Published “The MustCreate Pattern for Go Tests”
• Replaced CircleCI with NixCI
  • And tuned Nix builds to cache better
• Moved source repo from GitHub to Codefloe
• Moved hosting from Netlify to Surge
• Switched external link checks from htmlproofer to Lychee
  • I’ve been using htmlproofer for like 8 years and never looked into alternatives, but now I’m checking like 2000 external links on every commit
  • Lychee + Nix lets me cache the results so I don’t check unless the links change
  • I partitioned the links into five host groups so that I’m not checking every link every time, but it’s spread out enough that I expect most hosts to get checked every few weeks
  • Updated URLs to reduce redirects
  • Drastically simplified the list of dead link excludes
  • Fixed a bunch of dead links
• Added a completion date for Refactoring English
• Matched inline code height to surrounding text and removed extra padding
• Added Prettier coverage for Hugo shortcodes
• Added an `AGENTS.md file
• Improved layout on tag index pages
• Added .env files to .gitignore
• Fixed a typo in NOTICE

Refactoring English

Book

• Published 1.0.12 revision
• Fixed some grammar errors
• Changed PDF rendering to prevent blockquotes from straddling multiple pages
• Continued tuning vertical margins between headings and lists and paragraphs
• Fixed awkward page breaks
• Added a test to make sure chapter titles never are large enough to cause a line break
• Simplified markdown semantics so that newline always means newline
  • Previous implementation ignored newlines unless they were preceded by backslash, which revealed I was accidentally swallowing newlines that I meant to be newlines
• Trimmed some low-value tests

Website

• Added a shortcode for generating table of contents headers at site generation time
• Adjusted vertical spacing to match the book

Feedback app

• Ported improvements from go-app-starter

Lockwood Backend

• Ported improvements from go-app-starter

go-app-starter

• Updated Go testing guidance
• Updated to Flyctl 0.4.111 for deployment and development
• Added stricter static analysis for Go code
  • And removed remove agent rules already enforced by automated checks
• Continued tuning the workflow of backporting changes from child repos
• Fixed nix-ci’s default branch name

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).

• Ported improvements from go-app-starter

ScreenJournal

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

• Ported improvements from go-app-starter

HN Observer

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

• Ported improvements from go-app-starter

Grosiree

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

• Impoved checkbox performance on slow connections
• Ported improvements from go-app-starter

NixOS config

• Added more rules for forgejo in AGENTS
• Added a global AGENTS rule to tell agents to stop editing README.md or AGENTS.md
  • All their edits are pretty bad, and it’s easier if I just do it for them.
• Increase frequency of TickTick API polling from every 60m to every 8m
• Reduced the number of things that require restarting my entire AI sandbox VM
• Bumped sandbox VM resources to 12 vCPUs and 24 GiB of RAM
• Refactored code to avoid duplicating my username everywhere

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.

• Updated Docker container to Alpine 3.24.4
• Changed guest links to always use the injected clock
  • In production, I was cheating by letting it call time.Now directly, which made it hard to test certain scenarios
• Fixed a bug in upload failure error messages
• Published a security advisory
  • It’s pretty minor, but I guess PicoShare has ended up in some kind of targets list, so I was getting a new security report about the same issue every day until I published it

aw-web-ng

• Fixed aggregation across multiple days
• Fixed date-range error messages
• Ported improvements from go-app-starter

logpaste

• Updated to go 1.27.3
• Eliminated a dependency on Gorilla mux
• Deleted dead links to logpaste.com
  • I stopped renewing the domain a while ago
• Deleted a broken CI deployment to Fly.io from CircleCI
  • I deleted that server earlier this year
• Updated to go-evolutionary-migrate v2.0.1 for SQLite migrations

Weekly snippets

• Limited Forgejo commit scans to the current week rather than the full history
• Updated Surge to 0.55.0
• Improved logging on forge HTTP requests

Maildir Viewer

• Improved logging when full-text searches fail
• Fixed a stack overflow issue when searching deeply nested HTML email without plain-text alternatives
• Ported improvements from go-app-starter

Misc

• Backed up my WakaTime data and canceled my subscription
  • Good few years, but I get better information from self-hosting aw-web-ng