I’ve only been married for a few years, but I have a fantastic marriage tip you won’t hear from any marriage counselor or book: Get a couple’s email domain What’s a couple’s email domain? My wife and I share a .com domain name for email. I’m not going to reveal our real domain name, but pretend it’s this: @shinytable.com Emails to michael@shinytable.com go to both me and my wife, and the same for her name.

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. I keep an AirGradient ONE air quality monitor in my office to measure CO2 and pollution. The existing documentation for flashing firmware requires you to use the Arduino IDE, a clunky GUI program:

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:

p img { display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } 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.