Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Monday, 22nd February 2021

Fuzzy Name Matching in Postgres. Paul Ramsey describes how to implement fuzzy name matching in PostgreSQL using the fuzzystrmatch extension and its levenshtein() and soundex() functions, plus functional indexes to query against indexed soundex first and then apply slower Levenshtein. The same tricks should also work against SQLite using the datasette-jellyfish plugin. # 9:16 pm

Business rules engines are li’l Conway’s Law devices: a manifestation of the distrust between stakeholders, client and contractor. We require BREs so that separate business units need not talk to each other to solve problems. They are communication and organizational dysfunction made silicon.

Paul Smith # 8:34 pm

Blazing fast CI with pytest-split and GitHub Actions (via) pytest-split is a neat looking variant on the pattern of splitting up a test suite to run different parts of it in parallel on different machines. It involves maintaining a periodically updated JSON file in the repo recording the average runtime of different tests, to enable them to be more fairly divided among test runners. Includes a recipe for running as a matrix in GitHub Actions. # 7:06 pm

People, processes, priorities. Twitter thread from Adrienne Porter Felt outlining her model for thinking about engineering management. I like this trifecta of “people, processes, priorities” a lot. # 5:21 pm

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2021 » February

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