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Two years ago, I created a website for my business. By combining my terrible design skills with a decent-looking template, I created a site that looked okay. I told myself that if the business took off, I’d hire a real designer to make it look professional. TinyPilot website, before design changes A year later, the business was generating $45k/month in revenue, but my website still looked like a c

Here’s a riddle. My web app keeps all of its data in a SQL database. I can spontaneously tear it down, deploy the code to a different hosting platform, and the app will still serve all the same data. Running my app in production costs $0.03 per month. How is this possible? That’s easy. You have a separate database server running somewhere that stores all of your app’s state. No, my app never talks

TinyPilot is my inexpensive, open-source device for controlling computers remotely. It works even before the operating system boots, so I use TinyPilot to install new OSes and debug boot failures on my bare metal homelab servers. This post details my experience creating TinyPilot and shows how you can build your own for under $100 using a Raspberry Pi. Using TinyPilot to control my Ubuntu laptop f

My second year was a huge improvement financially. I increased profits by $18.5k! Overall, I still lost money, but try not to get too hung up on that. I tripled revenue to $7.2k and cut expenses by more than half. How can you afford to keep losing money? 🔗︎My long-term unprofitability often perplexes people. They assume I fund my money-losing endeavors with freelance work, but the truth is that 1

For the past four years, I’ve worked as a software developer at Google. On February 1st, I quit. It was because they refused to buy me a Christmas present. Well, I guess it’s a little more complicated than that. The first two years 🔗︎Two years in, I loved Google. When the annual employee survey asked me whether I expected to be at Google in five years, it was a no-brainer. Of course I’d still be

Lately, I’ve been reading articles about best practices for code reviews. I notice that these articles focus on finding bugs to the exclusion of almost every other component of a review. Communicating issues you discover in a constructive and professional way? Irrelevant! Just identify all the bugs, and the rest will take care of itself. So I had a revelation: if this works for code, why not roman

Introduction 🔗︎This is the story of GreenPiThumb: a gardening bot that automatically waters houseplants, but also sometimes kills them. The story begins about a year ago, when I was struck by a sudden desire to own a houseplant. A plant would look nice, supply me with much needed oxygen, and imply to guests that I’m a responsible grown-up, capable of caring for a living thing. But I’m a programme