January 2021
Jan. 3, 2021
Weeknotes: A flurry of not-quite-finished features
My Christmas present to myself this year was to allow myself to spend a week working on stuff I found interesting, rather than sticking to the most important things. This may have been a mistake: it’s left me with a flurry of interesting but not-quite-finished features.
[... 2,249 words]sqlite-utils 3.2 (via) As discussed in my weeknotes yesterday, this is the release of sqlite-utils that adds the new “cached table counts via triggers” mechanism.
Jan. 4, 2021
hooks-in-a-nutshell.js (via) Neat, heavily annotated implementation of React-style hooks in pure JavaScript, really useful for understanding how they work.
Jan. 5, 2021
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About GitHub (But Were Afraid To Ask) (via) ClickHouse by Yandex is an open source column-oriented data warehouse, designed to run analytical queries against TBs of data. They’ve loaded the full GitHub Archive of events since 2011 into a public instance, which is a great way of both exploring GitHub activity and trying out ClickHouse. Here’s a query I just ran that shows number of watch events per year, for example:
SELECT toYear(created_at) as yyyy, count() FROM github_events WHERE event_type = ’WatchEvent’ group by yyyy
Generally, product-aligned teams deliver better products more rapidly. Again, Conway’s Law is inescapable; if delivering a new feature requires several teams to coordinate, you’ll struggle compared to an org where a single team can execute on a new feature.
DALL·E: Creating Images from Text (via) “DALL·E is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3 trained to generate images from text descriptions, using a dataset of text–image pairs.”. The examples in this paper are astonishing—“an illustration of a baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog” generates exactly that.
Jan. 6, 2021
brumm.af/shadows (via) I did not know this trick: by defining multiple box-shadow values as a comma separated list you can create much more finely tuned shadow effects. This tool by Philipp Brumm provides a very smart UI for designing shadows.
When you know something it is almost impossible to imagine what it is like not to know that thing. This is the curse of knowledge, and it is the root of countless misunderstandings and inefficiencies. Smart people who are comfortable with complexity can be especially prone to it!
If you don’t guard against the curse of knowledge it has the potential to obfuscate all forms of communication, including code. The more specialized your work, the greater the risk that you will communicate in ways that are incomprehensible to the uninitiated.
Jan. 7, 2021
Custom Properties as State.
Fascinating thought experiment by Chris Coyier: since CSS custom properties can be defined in an external stylesheet, we can APIs that return stylesheets defining dynamically server-side generated CSS values for things like time-of-day colour schemes or even strings that can be inserted using ::after { content: var(--my-property).
This gave me a very eccentric idea for a Datasette plugin...
datasette-css-properties (via) My new Datasette plugin defines a “.css” output format which returns the data from the query as a valid CSS stylesheet defining custom properties for each returned column. This means you can build a page using just HTML and CSS that consumes API data from Datasette, no JavaScript required! Whether this is a good idea or not is left as an exercise for the reader.
APIs from CSS without JavaScript: the datasette-css-properties plugin
I built a new Datasette plugin called datasette-css-properties. It’s very, very weird—it adds a .css output extension to Datasette which outputs the result of a SQL query using CSS custom property format. This means you can display the results of database queries using pure CSS and HTML, no JavaScript required!
Jan. 10, 2021
Weeknotes: datasette-export-notebook, PyInstaller packaged Datasette, CBSAs
What a terrible week. I’ve found it hard to concentrate on anything substantial. In a mostly futile attempt to distract myself from doomscrolling I’ve mainly been building some experimental output plugins, fiddling with PyInstaller and messing around with shapefiles.
[... 732 words]Jan. 12, 2021
Culture is the Behavior You Reward and Punish (via) Jocelyn Goldfein describes an intriguing exercise for discovering your company culture: imagine a new hire asking for advice on what makes people successful there, and use that to review what behavior is rewarded and discouraged.
Jan. 17, 2021
Weeknotes: Still pretty distracted
Not a lot to report this week. U.S. politics continues to make it extremely difficult to focus on anything substantial.
[... 727 words]Jan. 22, 2021
Tuesday’s chaos arose after China Railway Shenyang failed to deactivate Flash in time, leading to a complete shutdown of its railroads in Dalian, Liaoning province. Staffers were reportedly unable to view train operation diagrams, formulate train sequencing schedules and arrange shunting plans.
Authorities fixed the issue by installing a pirated version of Flash at 4:30 a.m. the following day.
Jan. 24, 2021
Drawing shapes on a map to query a SpatiaLite database (and other weeknotes)
This week I built a Datasette plugin that lets you query a database by drawing shapes on a map!
[... 950 words]Jan. 25, 2021
Datasette 0.54: The annotated release notes
Datasette 0.54 is out today, with a number of foundational new features. As I’ve done for previous releases, here are the annotated release notes with some additional commentary.
[... 1,276 words]Jan. 29, 2021
Making GitHub’s new homepage fast and performant. A couple of really clever tricks in this article by Tobias Ahlin. The first is using IntersectionObserver in conjunction with the video preload=“none” attribute to lazily load a video when it scrolls into view. The second is an ingenious trick to create an efficiently encoded transparent JPEG image: embed the image in a SVG file twice, once as the image and once as a transparency mask.
Jan. 31, 2021
Weeknotes: datasette-leaflet, datasette-plugin cookiecutter upgrades
This week I shipped Datasette 0.54, sent out the latest Datasette Newsletter and then mostly worked on follow-up projects.
[... 552 words]Technology does not need vast troves of personal data stitched together across dozens of websites and apps in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it, and we're here today because the path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom.
— Tim Cook