June 2019
June 8, 2019
Friday wins and a case study in ritual design. “Culture is what you celebrate. Rituals are the tools you use to shape culture.”
June 9, 2019
datasette-bplist (via) It turns out an OS X laptop is positively crammed with SQLite databases, and many of them contain values that are data structures encoded using Apple’s binary plist format. datasette-bplist is my new plugin to help explore those files: it provides a display hook for rendering their contents, and a custom bplist_to_json() SQL function which can be used to extract and query information that is embedded in those values. The README includes tips on how to pull interesting EXIF data out of the SQLite database that sits behind Apple Photos.
datasette-render-binary (via) Yet another tiny Datasette plugin. This one attempts to render binary data in a slightly more readable fashion—it shows ASCII characters as they are, and shows all other data as monospace octets. Useful as a tool for exploring new unfamiliar databases as it makes it easier to spot if a binary column may contain a decipherable binary format.
There’s a spectrum on YouTube between the calm section — the Walter Cronkite, Carl Sagan part — and Crazytown, where the extreme stuff is. If I’m YouTube and I want you to watch more, I’m always going to steer you toward Crazytown.
June 12, 2019
Serverless Microservice Patterns for AWS (via) A handy collection of 19 architectural patterns for AWS Lambda collected by Jeremy Daly.
paginate-json (via) I released a fun tiny utility: paginate-json, which knows how to paginate through JSON APIs that use the HTTP Link header for pagination. I built it so I could pull data from the GitHub API and pipe it directly into SQLite via sqlite-utils.
June 14, 2019
Convert Locations.kml (pulled from an iPhone backup) to SQLite. I’ve been playing around with data from my iPhone using the iPhone Backup Extractor app and one of the things it exports for you is a Locations.kml file full of location history data. I wrote a tiny script using Python’s ElementTree XMLPullParser to efficiently iterate through the Placemarks and yield them as dictionaries, which I then batch-inserted into sqlite-utils to create a SQLite database.
June 15, 2019
When should you be using Web Workers? 85% of worldwide mobile devices are massively less performant than high end iPhones. Surma argues that we should be making aggressive use of Web Workers to keep as much of our JavaScript as possible off the main UI thread, to avoid freezing up the entire interface.
Toward a “Kernel Python” (via) Glyph makes a strong case for releasing a slimmed down “kernel” version of Python with the minimal possible standard library, and argues that the current standard library is proving impossible for a single core team to productively maintain. “If I wanted to update the colorsys module to be more modern—perhaps to have a Color object rather than a collection of free functions, perhaps to support integer color models—I’d likely have to wait 500 days, or more, for a review.”
June 18, 2019
Announcing Envoy Mobile. This is a fascinating development: Lyft’s Envoy proxy / service mesh has been widely adopted across the industry as a server-side component for adding smart routing and observability to the network calls made between services in microservice architectures. “The reality is that three 9s at the server-side edge is meaningless if the user of a mobile application is only able to complete the desired product flows a fraction of the time”—so Lyft are building a C++ embedded library companion to Envoy which is designed to be shipped as part of iOS and Android client applications. “Envoy Mobile in conjunction with Envoy in the data center will provide the ability to reason about the entire distributed system network, not just the server-side portion.” Their decision to release an early working prototype and then conduct ongoing development entirely in the open is interesting too.
June 22, 2019
json-flatten. A little Python library I wrote that attempts to flatten a JSON object into a set of key/value pairs suitable for transmitting in a query string or using to construct an HTML form. I first wrote this back in 2015 as a Gist—I’ve reconstructed the Gist commit history in a new repository and shipped it to PyPI.
June 23, 2019
Porting Datasette to ASGI, and Turtles all the way down
This evening I finally closed a Datasette issue that I opened more than 13 months ago: #272: Port Datasette to ASGI. A few notes on why this is such an important step for the project.
[... 1,082 words]June 25, 2019
Feature Toggles (aka Feature Flags). I’m a huge fan of feature flags as a way of managing feature releases and keeping incomplete code in master as opposed to maintaining long-running branches. Recently I’ve found myself pointing people to this essay by Pete Hodgson—it’s a great overview of feature flags (here called toggles) and I particularly like how it splits them into four categories: Release Toggles, Experiment Toggles, Ops Toggles and Permissioning Toggles.