July 2019
47 posts: 1 entry, 14 links, 32 beats
July 1, 2019
db-to-sqlite 1.0 release. I’ve released version 1.0 of my db-to-sqlite tool, which lets you create a SQLite database copy of any database supported by SQLAlchemy (I’ve tested it against MySQL and PostgreSQL). The tool has a bunch of new features: you can use --redact to redact specific columns, specify --table multiple times to copy a subset of tables, and the --all option now efficiently adds all foreign keys at the end of the import. The project now has unit tests which run against MySQL and PostgreSQL in Travis CI. Also included in the README: a shell one-liner for creating a local SQLite copy of a remote Heroku Postgres database based on extracting the connection string from a Heroku config environment variable.
July 3, 2019
Choose Boring Technology (via) The definitive write-up of Dan McKinley’s presentation on why you should mostly use “boring” technology rather than going after the latest shiniest stack components. There’s so much accumulated wisdom in here. I particularly like how Dan owns up to having introduced Scala and MongoDB at Etsy before eventually helping remove them and go back to something less exciting and far more predictable. Also neat: the site is generated using Dan’s better-keynote-export tool which helps turn Keynote presentations into a flat web page with notes and images.
PugSQL. Interesting new twist on a definitely-not-an-ORM library for Python. With PugSQL you define SQL queries in files, give them names and then load them into a module which allows you to execute them as Python methods with keyword arguments. You can mark statements as only returning a single row (or a single scalar value) with a comment at the top of their file.
July 4, 2019
July 5, 2019
How FZF and ripgrep improved my workflow (via) I’m already a keen user of ripgrep (a crazy-fast grep alternative) but fzf was new to me: it’s a CLI utility that lets you pipe in a list of strings, then gives you a typeahead search interface to search and select a string before returning the selected string to stdout when you hit enter. This means you can pipe it together with other tools to add a dynamic selection step, which has all kinds of delightful combinations. “vi $(find . | fzf)” for example opens vi against the file you selected.
July 6, 2019
July 7, 2019
July 8, 2019
Datasette 0.29 (via) I shipped Datasette 0.29! • ASGI all the way down! Plus a new asgi_wrapper plugin hook letting plugins do all kinds of powerful new things • New mechanism for secret plugin configuration options • Facet by date • ?_through= for joins through m2m tables. Much more.
datasette-auth-github (via) My first big ASGI plugin for Datasette: datasette-auth-github adds the ability to require users to authenticate against the GitHub OAuth API. You can whitelist specific users, or you can restrict access to members of specific GitHub organizations or teams. While it’s structured as a Datasette plugin it also includes ASGI middleware which can be applied to any ASGI application.
datasette-cors (via) My other Datasette ASGI plugin: this one wraps my asgi-cors project and lets you configure CORS access from a list of domains (or a set of domain wildcards) so you can make JavaScript calls to a Datasette instance from a specific set of other hosts.
July 11, 2019
July 12, 2019
Details of the Cloudflare outage on July 2, 2019 (via) Best retrospective I’ve read in a long time. The outage was caused by a backtracking regex rule that was added to the Web Application Firewall project, which rolls out globally and skips most of Cloudflare’s regular graduar rollout process (delightfully animal themed, named DOG for the dogfooding PoP that their employees use, PIG for the Guinea Pig PoPs reserved for free customers, then Canary for the final step) so that they can deploy counter-measures to newly discovered vulnerabilities as quickly as possible—but the real value in the retro is that it provides an extremely deep insight into how Cloudflare organize, test and manage their changes. Really interesting stuff.