Seven years ago, I built my first home server. It made my software development work faster and more enjoyable, so I’ve gotten more into the home server scene. I built a custom storage server, another development server, and a dedicated firewall.

At some point, my wife gently observed that my office was filling with unsightly wires. “What?” I asked. “This is a normal amount of wires.” But then I looked around and realized it was kind of a lot of wires…

Highlights

• We completed the first-ever TinyPilot release where I didn’t perform any release task directly.
• Publishing a release through delegation helped identify many undocumented or poorly conceived steps in our release process.
• I’m continuing to enjoy writing a bytecode interpreter in Zig.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

For the past few months, I’ve been curious about two technologies: the Zig programming language and Ethereum cryptocurrency. To learn more about both, I’ve been using Zig to write a bytecode interpreter for the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

Zig is a great language for performance optimization, as it gives you fine-grained control over memory and control flow. To motivate myself, I’ve been benchmarking my Ethereum implementation against the official Go implementation.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company.

For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. The best of them earned a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, but none were profitable.

Halfway through my third year, I created a device called TinyPilot. It allows users to control their computers remotely. The product quickly caught on, and it’s been my main focus ever since.