June 2020
74 posts: 6 entries, 14 links, 4 quotes, 50 beats
June 1, 2020
Get Started—Materialize. Materialize is a really interesting new database—“a streaming SQL materialized view engine”. It builds materialized views on top of streaming data sources (such as Kafka)—you define the view using a SQL query, then it figures out how to keep that view up-to-date automatically as new data streams in. It speaks the PostgreSQL protocol so you can talk to it using the psql tool or any PostgreSQL client library. The “get started” guide is particularly impressive: it uses a curl stream of the Wikipedia recent changes API, parsed using a regular expression. And it’s written in Rust, so installing it is as easy as downloading and executing a single binary (though I used Homebrew).
June 2, 2020
Working Backwards: A New Version Of Amazon’s “Press Release” Approach To Plan Customer-Centric Projects (via) I’ve long wanted to give the Amazon “future press release” trick a go—start a project by writing the imaginary press release that would announce that project to the world, in order to focus on understanding what the project is for and how it will deliver value. Jeff Gothelf has put a lot of thought into this and constructed a thorough looking template for writing one of these that covers a number of different important project aspects.
June 3, 2020
June 4, 2020
Weeknotes, I guess
What a week. Hard to work up the enthusiasm to write about what I’ve been working on.
[... 314 words]June 5, 2020
June 6, 2020
A List of Hacker News’s Undocumented Features and Behaviors (via) If you’re interested in community software design this is a neat insight into the many undocumented features of Hacker News, collated by Max Woolf.
June 9, 2020
Apple password-manager-resources (via) Apple maintain on open source repository full of heuristics for implementing smart password managers. It lists password rules for different sites (e.g. min/max length, special characters required), change password URLs for different services and sites that share credential backends—like icloud.com and apple.com. They accept pull requests!
Tip for changing cookie subdomains: change the cookie name too. This is a really useful tip I hadn’t encountered before. If you make a change to the way cookies are configured—changing the cookie domain or path for example—it’s a good idea to change the name of the cookie as well. If you don’t change the cookie name you’ll see weird behaviour for users who have previously had the cookie set using the older configuration. This definitely explains bugs I’ve seen in the past. Filing this tip away for future cookie-related development work.
June 10, 2020
June 11, 2020
June 12, 2020
Datasette 0.44: The annotated release notes
I just released Datasette 0.44 to PyPI. With 128 commits since 0.43 this is the biggest release in a long time—and likely the last major release of new features before Datasette 1.0.
[... 1,648 words]June 13, 2020
June 15, 2020
How much can you learn from just two columns?
Derek Willis shared an intriguing dataset this morning: a table showing every Twitter account followed by an official GOP congressional Twitter account.
[... 951 words]Happy Birthday Sea Lions! (via) Today, June 15th, is Sea Lion birthday—half of all California Sea Lions are born today thanks to clever co-ordinated delayed implantation by Sea Lion females. Natalie has started making nature videos and I’ve been tagging along as her camera-person—this three minute video, shot at Pier 39 in San Francisco, celebrates Sea Lion birthday and explains how it works.
June 17, 2020
June 18, 2020
Refactoring optional chaining into a large codebase: lessons learned (via) JavaScript now supports foo?.bar?.baz?.() optional chaining syntax across all major browsers. Lea Verou provides the definitive guide to using it to refactor code.