Update for the week ending on Friday, Nov 15, 2019

mtlynch.io

• Published “Eliminating Distractions from Social Media, Email, and StackOverflow”
  • And for the first time for one of my posts, published an accompanying tweetstorm
  • Surprisingly low traction on this post.
    • I thought this one would be more of a crowd-pleaser, but it failed to pick up any steam on Hacker News, though it got some love on Twitter.

Is It Keto

• Edited and published two new articles from my writer:
  • Perfect Keto Salted Caramel Bars
  • Red Bull
• Lots of UI tweaks
  • Food page changes - Mobile
  • Food page changes - Desktop
  • Homepage changes - Desktop
  • Meal plan changes - Desktop
• Changed related product suggestions to happen post page-load through JavaScript
  • It turned out they were causing slow page loads because they required many needless datastore reads
• Realized my e2e tests had been broken and falsely passing for weeks
  • It turns out that the default CircleCI machine image uses an older version of docker-compose that doesn’t set a failing exit code when a child container dies with an error
    • My app container was always dying, but Docker didn’t care because it was only paying attention to the exit code from the Cypress image
    • Later versions of docker-compose properly set the exit code if the Cypress container fails to run
    • Fix was to just add an explicit machine image with a later docker version (like this)
• Did lots of refactoring of my templates now that I understand Jinja templates better
• Added lots of new e2e tests to make sure I didn’t break anything while I was refactoring my templates
• Fixed some bugs in my hacky tool for finding crosslink opportunities between pages
• Added some new internal crosslinks between pages

Firestore Emulator Docker Image

I discovered there’s an official emulator for Google Cloud Firestore. Several people had created Docker images for it, but I couldn’t find anyone that had publicly hosted their image on Docker Hub, so I made my own.

• Cleaned up the README.
• Got rid of non-functional artifacts from the time the image was an emulator for Google Cloud Datastore.
• Added tests and CI configuration.
• Added sensible defaults for the environment variables.
• Added support for a user-configurable port number.

What Got Done

• Deleted the Redis datastore implementation I was so proud of a few weeks ago in favor of the simpler Firestore Emulator (#369)
• Switched to an explicit machine image in CircleCI (#368)
  • I didn’t want What Got Done to get the same e2e false positives I suffered with Is It Keto (see above)

Zestful

• Added support for “tiny” as a size modifier
• Added more pre-processing to throw away garbage in the ingredient string before passing it along to the ML model
  • e.g., “2 cups corn starch (I use Foo Brand)” (the “I use…” is garbage)
• Tried to train a new model, but for the first time ever, new model scored worse than old model
  • It was a difference of 1-2%, so I think it’s just noise, but I held off on releasing the new model to err on the side of caution
  • Fixed 500-800 mislabeled training examples

Misc

• Attended a Valley Venture Mentors event
  • Cool organization. They provide free funding and guidance to startups in the Pioneer Valley.
• Met someone at the event interested in collaborating on a niche software product
  • Arranged a meeting for next week
• Advertised the next Indie Hacker Western Mass meetup on Hidden Tech, a mailing list I recently discovered for technologists in Western Mass.
• Edited essays for a friend’s grad school application.

Home Maintenance

• Discovered I have a mouse problem in my house
  • They haven’t stolen any food yet, but I can hear them crawling around in the ceilings and gnawing on stuff
  • Set a mouse trap, which ended up working amazingly and caught 5 mice the first night
  • Consulted with some pest control companies to get mouseproofing work on my house to identify the mice’s entrypoints

Home Video Digitization

Last year, I digitized about 40 hours of my family’s old home videos and put them on a private media server for my family. I’m in the process of cleaning up my tools so I can publish a guide about this.

• Cleaned up logic for adding tags to videos
  • The original code has lots of hacks and shortcuts specific to my family, so I’m refactoring all of that out so I can publish the source

Beekeeping

• After one week with the pre-winter syrup feeders
  • Brown hive completely emptied their feeder:
  • White hive only ate about half of their syrup
  • Surprising given that white hive is low on honey stores, so they presumably need to store more
• So, I just moved the partially full feeder from white hive to brown hive

Dusty VCR Podcast

• Published Episode #13 - While You Were Sleeping
• Canceled my Libsyn account now that my migration to Anchor.fm is complete
• Fixed Permalinks (#48), which I had unknowingly broken when I migrated from Gatsby to Hugo (#44)