Simon Willison’s Weblog

Weeknotes: this week was absurd

18th March 2020

As of this morning, San Francisco is in a legally mandated shelter-in-place. I can hardly remember what life was like seven days ago. It’s been a very long, very crazy week. This was not a great week for getting stuff done.

So very short weeknotes today.

• I started work on datasette-edit-tables, a plugin that will eventually allow Datasette users to modify tables—add columns, change the types of existing columns, rename tables and suchlike. So far all it offers is a delete table button.
• I released sqlite-utils 2.4.2 (and 2.4.1 before it) with a couple of bug fixes. Notably it does a better job detecting the types of different existing SQLite columns—it turns out SQLite supports a wide range of cosmetic column types.
• I did a bit of work on my github-contents library, which aims to make it as easy as possible to write code that updates text stored in a GitHub repository. I want to be able to use it to programmatically create pull requests (so I can add a visual editor to my cryptozoology crowdsourcing project). I added a branch_exists() method and I’m working on being able to commit to a branch other than master.

Natalie and I are hunkering down for the long run here in San Francisco, attempting to stay mentally healthy through aggressive use of Zoom and Google Hangouts. Best of luck to everyone out there getting through this thing.