Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 28th November 2017

Big Data Workflow with Pandas and SQLite (via) Handy tutorial on dealing with larger data (in this case a 3.9GB CSV file) by incrementally loading it into pandas and writing it out to SQLite. # 11:02 pm

Boiling the Ocean, Incrementally—How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox. Firefox Quantum is the product of an impressive, highly risky chain of software engineering—Rust, Servo, then Stylo. # 8:34 pm

For most books, the review is a bell-shaped curve of star ratings; this one has a peak at 1, a peak at 5, and very little in between. How could this be? I think it is because SICP is a very personal message that works only if the reader is at heart a computer scientist (or willing to become one).

Peter Norvig # 6:38 pm

Firefox Debugger Playground. Excellent hands-on tutorial to using the Firefox JavaScript debugger. I learned a bunch of neat tricks from this—including using conditional breakpoints to add temporary console.log statements—since that function returns undefined it won’t pause your code, but this saves you from having to remember to remove the lines from your source code later. I also didn’t know that the Firefox debugger can show the value of variables in paused code if you hover over them in the source pane. [UPDATE: Turns out Chrome DevTools do this as well—TIL] # 4:01 pm

The Best Request Is No Request, Revisited · An A List Apart Article. In HTTP/2 the rules have changed: serving unnecessary code as part of a larger bundle to avoid extra request overhead no longer makes sense. Splitting your code into many files and loading just the ones needed by the current page can knock seconds off your load time. # 3:50 pm