Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
TinyPilot: Month 39
New here?
Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $80-100k/month in revenue and employs six other people.
Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall.
Highlights
- I’m trying to work around manufacturer delays.
- I’ve decided to hang onto TinyPilot’s office for two more months.
- I’m planning my escape from a miserable seller experience on RapidAPI.
Goal grades
At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:
Running NixOS on Proxmox
One of the stumbling blocks I ran into when trying out NixOS was that I couldn’t run it under Proxmox, my preferred virtual machine server.
Through some trial and error, I figured out how to install NixOS as a Proxmox container.
Download the NixOS container image
First, download the latest NixOS x86_x64 lxdContainerImage image. For other hardware architectures, see this GitHub comment.
TinyPilot: Month 38
New here?
Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $60-80k/month in revenue and employs seven other people.
Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall.
Highlights
- I failed to sell recurring TinyPilot license subscriptions.
- I realized I made TinyPilot way too configurable.
- I thought I’d been investing poorly into TinyPilot’s development, but writing this retrospective made me realize I’m mostly on track.
Goal grades
At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:
Import from a URL in Nix
I’m still a Nix beginner, and one thing I couldn’t figure out until recently was how to keep parts of my configuration.nix file under source control.
My goal
I’d like for my Nix configuration files to be modular and reusable, so depending on the system or flake, I can pull in only the configuration files I need. I’d like all my Nix configuration files to be under source control so that different systems can depend on different versions of any file so I don’t have to upgrade every system to the latest version of each configuration file at the same time.
Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek Documentary, 18 Years Later
In 2005, Joel Spolsky’s software company, Fog Creek, filmed a documentary about their summer internship program. The film is called Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks, and it follows four college interns as they design, implement, and launch a completely new software product.
That’s not the interesting part.
Looking back on this documentary 18 years later, it’s striking how many interviews it captured with people who would go on to greater fame and success: