More from mtlynch.io
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my book and my professional life overall. Highlights I’m running late on my book. A great blog post inspired me to think more about convenience shell scripts. The game Oxygen Not Included is fun. Goal grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my book and my professional life overall. Highlights I got useful feedback from early readers about my chapter list. I found it frustrating to edit video of an interview but had fun creating a written transcript. My plan to promote my freelance blog editing services went better than I expected. Goal grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:
New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my book and my professional life overall. 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 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:
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Being focused is about doing less things, and giving more space to the stuff that matters. I am spread out on too many projects and I can’t give enough attention to all of them. It’s time to clearly sort out which one I will keep maintaining and which I should drop entirely. Chuttersnap Mikochi Mikochi is a self-hostable remote file manager I’ve started in 2023. It’s my most successful open source project. I personally use it every day, and thousands of people have adopted it and started using it on their own servers. This year the project has been receiving more and more attention. Maybe it just reached a critical mass of users. In practice, that means a bit more maintenance work, since people have been pointing out bugs and suggesting new features. At the same time, working on Mikochi is fairly enjoyable. It’s a small, self-contained project made with technologies I enjoy working with. I’ve got no complaints about spending some time working on it. Verdict: Keep maintaining Mikochi and actively continue improving it. Itako Itako is an investment portfolio tracking SaaS. I built it for the most part between 2023 and 2025. In terms of scope, it’s the largest project I’ve done entirely by myself. Is it a success? Not really. There are definitely a lot of people who tried Itako, and some who’ve kept using it a bit. But it’s not engaging enough for anyone to consider getting the premium plan. And honestly I don’t find myself using it that much. My view of investing and portfolio management has significantly shifted since I started this project. While I used to think that more sophisticated analysis would lead to better returns, I now realize that the only strategies that consistently make money are honestly stupidly simple. Or maybe it’s a U curve: on one end you’ve got a monkey throwing darts, on the other end you’ve got Jane Street, and everyone in-between fails to beat the market. Anyway, the biggest issue with Itako is how dull working on it is. The interesting parts of the projects are working on statistics and data visualization. But in practice, 90% of the time is spent tediously fixing data, understanding why some German stocks have an exchange labelled XETRA instead of XETR, why some Belgian stocks still have quotes while Euronext shows them as delisted… Verdict: Shut down Itako today. Milou Milou is static site generator for press kits. It started as a fork of presskit.html which was completely abandoned at the time. It’s a very useful tool. At Tsukumogami, it’s part of our Cloudflare pipeline which builds our website in a few minutes whenever we need to change something. It seems like a few other game studios have picked it up, although I rarely get any feedback about it. I’ve not spent too much time working on it in 2026. I think it could be interesting to come back to it and add a feature or two. Better support for multiple languages could be an idea. At least, I need to make sure we don’t fall into the good old Node.js dependency rot. Verdict: Spend some time on Milou. Luluka Earlier this year, I created Luluka. It’s a CLI that allows previewing the output of Ebitengine shaders. I do still think Ebitengine is a great engine and Go is better suited for game development than most people realize. However, after quite a long period of experimentation around it, we’ve decided to remain a Godot studio. On top of having quite a large sunk cost in infrastructure surrounding Godot, the tooling and possibility of doing 3D games still makes it a more attractive engine for our use cases. And I’ve been doing a lot of 3D work lately, so better put those hours to use. Verdict: Archive the project. The rest I’ve had a lot of good ideas that stayed as almost empty repositories in my GitHub. For example, Hakumei was a terminal companion to Mikochi. I made a few commits on this project and never found the time to work on it again. I have to admit I’m probably never going to have the time to work on all those repositories. Time to archive them all!
I interviewed Clare from fileAI about fileForensics, launching on Product Hunt today
Congrats to Iuliia for reaching $4m ARR with Papermark. It's an open source alternative to Descend.
Interesting stuff here. This guy found that Marc Lou's ShipFast boilerplate dived in revenue from a height of $125k per month to $2,000.
Chris Oliver has announced the pricing of hosting on Hatchbox is going up. Hatchbox is a specialist hosting provider for web apps built with Ruby, Rails and Node.