Simon Willison’s Weblog

Setting up Datasette, step by step (via) Tobias describes how he runs Datasette on his own server/VPS, using nginx and systemd. I’m doing something similar for some projects and systemd really does feel like the solution to the “ensure a Python process keeps running” problem I’ve been fighting for over a decade. I really like how Tobias creates a dedicated Linux user for each of his deployed Python projects.

# 2:20 am / sysadmin, datasette

Thematic map—GIS Wiki. This is a really useful wiki full of GIS information, and the coverage of different types of thematic maps is particularly thorough.

# 2:25 am / gis, visualization, wiki

kepler.gl. Uber built this open source geospatial analysis tool for large-scale data sets, and they offer it as a free hosted online tool—just click Get Started on the site. I uploaded two CSV files with 30,000+ latitude/longitude points in them just now and used Kepler to render them as images.

# 4:16 am / geospatial, gis, visualization

Azure Readiness Checklist (via) I love a good comprehensive checklist. This one is focused on large projects running on Azure but it’s still fun to browse through if you are hosting elsewhere, mainly as a reminder of quite how much still goes into deploying large web services into production.

# 8:32 pm / azure, checklists, deployment

Calling C functions from BigQuery with web assembly (via) Google BigQuery lets you define custom SQL functions in JavaScript, and it turns out they expose the WebAssembly.instantiate family of APIs. Which means you can write your UDD in C or Rust, compile it to WebAssembly and run it as part of your query!

# 5:55 am / c, sql, rust, webassembly