I’ve purchased two AirGradient ONE indoor quality monitors to measure air quality in my home. AirGradient devices are open-source, so you can flash your own custom firmware and collect your air data locally rather than sending it to AirGradient’s proprietary cloud dashboard.

The existing documentation for flashing firmware requires you to use the Arduino IDE, a clunky GUI program:

Highlights

• I find that not every reader who purchases early access to my book wants to give me feedback about rough drafts.
• I figure out where all my time is going and think of ways to minimize time drains.
• I spend 10 hours reimplementing a web app from scratch that originally took me 300 hours to build.
• I continue to learn functional programming with Gleam, but I might be cheating.

Goal grades

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

I recently upgraded my home TrueNAS server and migrated 18 TB of data from a 4-disk RAIDZ1 ZFS pool to a new RAIDZ2 pool.

The neat part is that I did it with only three additional 8 TB disks and never transferred my data to external storage.

Upgrading from RAIDZ1 to RAIDZ2 without moving data to external storage is tricky because:

Highlights

• I look for ways to limit the number of half-complete tasks I’m juggling.
• I brainstorm ways to talk with more of my early readers.
• I have trouble accepting a design decision in the Gleam language.

Goal grades

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

Offer a lower-friction way for users to pre-order my book

• Result: Switched from Kickstarter pre-orders to Stripe payment links.
• Grade: A

I ran the initial pre-sale through Kickstarter, so I decided to just stick with it for subsequent pre-orders. After a couple of months, I realized Kickstarter requires customers to create an account to buy the book, which adds a lot of friction and discourages people from buying.

I recently returned a product to goHardDrive, a merchant that specializes in selling used hard drives. During the return process, I discovered that they were accidentally publishing details about thousands of their customers, including their full names, mailing addresses, email addresses, and order details.

The leak

When I requested a return from goHardDrive, they assigned me a return merchandise authorization (RMA) number ending in five numeric digits. I’m not publishing my actual RMA number, but you can imagine that it was a number like this: