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.

A year later, the business was generating $45k/month in revenue, but my website still looked like a college student’s hobby project. It was time for that professional redesign I’d promised myself.

Highlights

• TinyPilot reached an all-time high of $74k in revenue.
• I’m trying to figure out the best approach to software licensing.
• I’m still searching for a web framework I can love.

Goal grades

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

Create a self-contained tarball for installing TinyPilot

• Result: We now have a working tarball package
• Grade: A

TinyPilot’s install process has been growing more complex over time. It pulls in code from multiple repositories and third-party dependencies, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of those relationships.

Highlights

• The TinyPilot website redesign is finally done.
• I’ve learned to make Debian packages, and it’s surprisingly simple.
• I’ve given up on Vue and frontend frameworks in general.

Goal grades

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

Publish a blog post and video about building a homelab NAS server with TinyPilot

• Result: Published the post and accompanying video
• Grade: A

This was my first blog post in over a year that wasn’t a retrospective or year-end review. It got a so-so reception on reddit, but it reached #2 on Hacker News.

This year, I decided to build my first ever home storage server. It’s a 32 TB system that stores my personal and business data using open-source software.

The server itself cost $531, and I bought four disks for $732, bringing the total cost to $1,263. It’s similar in price to off-the-shelf storage servers, but it offers more power and customizability.

Highlights

• TinyPilot generates $58k/month in revenue yet somehow loses money.
• It’s more important than I thought to have low-latency insight into developers’ hours.
• I’m trying paid advertising again for the first time in almost two years.

Goal grades

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

Publish a blog post and video about building a homelab NAS server with TinyPilot

• Result: I’m nearly done, but I haven’t published yet.
• Grade: D

The blog post is turning out to be much longer than I expected. There are so many details I want to include about my thought process in choosing parts, and I didn’t realize how long that would take. I’m hoping to wrap up in the next couple of weeks.