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.

Highlights

• TinyPilot had its best sales month ever, with $69k of total revenue.
• I’m now five months and $32k over budget on a website redesign.
• I launched PicoShare, and it’s the fastest-growing project I’ve ever published.

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 TinyPilot Pro 2.4.0

• Result: Released TinyPilot 2.4.0 on schedule
• Grade: A

The latest release adds support for multiple users, which customers had requested for a while. We also eliminated an annoying bug that generated frequent support requests.

Highlights

• I hired TinyPilot’s first support engineer.
• I learned that hiring a support engineer is even harder than I expected.
• I’m evaluating platforms for paying international contractors.

Goal grades

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

Launch Voyager 2: PoE Edition

• Result: I finally launched Voyager 2 PoE
• Grade: A

Oh, boy. This took way longer than I expected. I looked back at the original design document that I wrote in early April 2021. I estimated that we’d have 200 units ready by May 15, 2021. In other words, I estimated six weeks, and it took 11 months.