October 2018
Oct. 4, 2018
The interesting ideas in Datasette
Datasette (previously) is my open source tool for exploring and publishing structured data. There are a lot of ideas embedded in Datasette. I realized that I haven’t put many of them into writing.
[... 2,857 words]Oct. 8, 2018
Relational databases are a commodity now, but they power a much larger fraction of the world’s economy that AI ever will. And no company has a “relational database strategy”.
The ASGI specification provides an opportunity for Python to hit a productivity/performance sweet-spot for a wide range of use-cases, from writing high-volume proxy servers through to bringing large-scale web applications to market at speed.
Oct. 10, 2018
github-debug.com (via) This is a neat trick: GitHub have a dedicated site for their support engineers to send you to if you can’t connect to them. The site tests download speeds from their various domains and then lets you click a button to have GitHub run a traceroute/ping from their servers to your detected IP address and output the results (use devtools to spy on their API method for doing this). Then you can paste the results into a message to their support team. Turns out fastly-debug.com and dropbox-debug.com implement a similar pattern for those services as well.
Oct. 18, 2018
Introduction to Redis Streams. Redis 5.0 is out, introducing the first new Redis data type in several years: streams, a Kafka-like mechanism for implementing a replayable event stream that can be read by many different subscribers.
Oct. 22, 2018
How I moderated the State of Django panel at DjangoCon US.
On Wednesday last week I moderated the State of Django panel as the closing session for DjangoCon US 2018.
[... 1,210 words]Oct. 25, 2018
How to Instantly Publish Data to the Internet with Datasette
I spoke about my Datasette project at PyBay in August and they’ve just posted the video of my talk.
[... 58 words]Oct. 28, 2018
python-twitter/get_access_token.py. Creating an OAuth token for accessing a specific Twitter account is way harder than it needs to be. I was about to write my own command-line script for doing this using PIN-based authentication (where you pop open a browser showing the Twitter login flow, then get a PIN number at the end which you paste back into your script) when I discovered that the python-twitter library already ships with a script to do exactly that. Just run “python get_access_token.py”, paste in your app’s consumer key and secret, follow a link, enter the resulting PIN and the script will spit out the consumer_key / consumer_secret / access_token_key / access_token_secret combo you need to start using the Twitter API.
Oct. 29, 2018
Automatically playing science communication games with transfer learning and fastai
This weekend was the 9th annual Science Hack Day San Francisco, which was also the 100th Science Hack Day held worldwide.
[... 1,174 words]Oct. 31, 2018
matthewp/haunted: React’s Hooks API implemented for web components (via) It’s been fascinating over the past few days watching various frontend web stacks start playing with the new ideas introduced by the proposed React hooks API. lit-html is one of my favourite React alternatives—it’s built on web components and makes really clever use of ES6 template literals (in place of React’s JSX, which requires an additional compilation step). With Haunted Matthew Phillips explores the combination of lit-html, web components and hooks-style state management.
This Is How We Radicalized The World (via) Don’t be put off by the click-baity title: this article by Ryan Broderick is absolutely worth your time. Ryan has been traveling the world covering the global rise of populism, which has been driven in a great part by new patterns of social media usage and distrust of the news media. Ryan ties together stories from a bunch of different countries over the last few years and make a compelling case that we need to come to terms with social media radicalization as a global problem and figure out how to respond to it and deal with the fallout.
Making Sense of React Hooks (via) Dan Abramov provides the most comprehensive justification I’ve seen so far for the new React hooks API.
October 21 post-incident analysis (via) Legitimately fascinating post-mortem by GitHub. They run database masters in multiple data centers with raft for leader election... but when they had an unexpected network split between east and west coast they ended up with several seconds of write that had not been correctly replicated. Cleaning up the resulting mess took the best part of 24 hours! Distributed systems are hard.
Reinforcement Learning with Prediction-Based Rewards (via) Fascinating result: by teaching a reinforcement learning agent that plays video games to optimize for “unfamiliar states”—states where it cannot predict what will happen next—the agent does a much better job of playing some games. “... for the first time exceeds average human performance on Montezuma’s Revenge. RND achieves state-of-the-art performance, periodically finds all 24 rooms and solves the first level without using demonstrations or having access to the underlying state of the game.”