Simon Willison’s Weblog

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April 2020

80 posts: 7 entries, 10 links, 3 quotes, 60 beats

April 24, 2020

Release dogsheep-photos 0.1a — Upload your photos to S3 and import metadata about them into a SQLite database
Release dogsheep-photos 0.2a — Upload your photos to S3 and import metadata about them into a SQLite database

Spotify introduced the vocabulary of missions, tribes, squads, guilds, and chapter leads for describing its way of working. It gave the illusion it had created something worthy of needing to learn unusual word choices. However, if we remove the unnecessary synonyms from the ideas, the Spotify model is revealed as a collection of cross-functional teams with too much autonomy and a poor management structure.

Jeremiah Lee

# 9:57 pm / management

April 26, 2020

TIL Fixing "compinit: insecure directories" error — Every time I opened a terminal on my new Mac running Catalina with zsh I got the following annoying error:

April 27, 2020

TIL Session-scoped temporary directories in pytest — I habitually use the `tmpdir` fixture in pytest to get a temporary directory that will be cleaned up after each test, but that doesn't work with `scope="session"` - which can be used to ensure an expensive fixture is run only once per test session and the generated content is used for multiple tests.

April 28, 2020

Bill Gates’s vision for life beyond the coronavirus. Fascinating interview with Bill Gates—the most interesting and informative article I’ve read about Covid-19 in quite a while.

# 1:01 am / bill-gates, covid19

April 29, 2020

TIL Generated a summary of nested JSON data — I was trying to figure out the shape of the JSON object from https://github.com/simonw/coronavirus-data-gov-archive/blob/master/data_latest.json?raw=true - which is 3.2MB and heavily nested, so it's difficult to get a good feel for the shape.

The biggest thing people don’t appreciate about large companies is the basic productive unit isn’t an individual it is an engineering team with about ~8 members.

Patrick McKenzie

# 6:39 am / management, patrick-mckenzie

Release conditional-get 0.1a — CLI tool for fetching data using HTTP conditional get
Release conditional-get 0.1.1a — CLI tool for fetching data using HTTP conditional get
TIL How to mock httpx using pytest-mock — I wrote this test to exercise some [httpx](https://pypi.org/project/httpx/) code today, using [pytest-mock](https://pypi.org/project/pytest-mock/).

If microservices are implemented incorrectly or used as a band-aid without addressing some of the root flaws in your system, you'll be unable to do new product development because you're drowning in the complexity.

Alexandra Noonan

# 5:56 pm / architecture, microservices

Weeknotes: Archiving coronavirus.data.gov.uk, custom pages and directory configuration in Datasette, photos-to-sqlite

I mainly made progress on three projects this week: Datasette, photos-to-sqlite and a cleaner way of archiving data to a git repository.

[... 1,132 words]

April 30, 2020

Release conditional-get 0.2a — CLI tool for fetching data using HTTP conditional get
Release datasette-atom 0.5 — Datasette plugin that adds a .atom output format
TIL Compile a new sqlite3 binary on Ubuntu — I wanted to try the `vacuum into` backup command that was released in SQLite3 3.27.0 [on 2019-02-07](https://www.sqlite.org/changes.html#version_3_27_0).
Release twitter-to-sqlite 0.21.1 — Save data from Twitter to a SQLite database
Release sqlite-utils 2.7 — Python CLI utility and library for manipulating SQLite databases
TIL Accessing repository dependencies in the GitHub GraphQL API — [Access to a Repositories Dependency Graph](https://developer.github.com/v4/previews/#access-to-a-repositories-dependency-graph) describes a preview API for accessing GitHub repository dependencies.
Release github-to-sqlite 2.1 — Save data from GitHub to a SQLite database

2020 » April

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