Thursday, 26th May 2022
Benjamin “Zags” Zagorsky: Handling Timezones in Python. The talks from PyCon US have started appearing on YouTube. I found this one really useful for shoring up my Python timezone knowledge: It reminds that if your code calls datetime.now(), datetime.utcnow() or date.today(), you have timezone bugs—you’ve been working with ambiguous representations of instances in time that could span a 26 hour interval from UTC-12 to UTC+14. date.today() represents a 24 hour period and hence is prone to timezone surprises as well. My code has a lot of timezone bugs!
upptime (via) “Open-source uptime monitor and status page, powered entirely by GitHub Actions, Issues, and Pages.” This is a very creative (ab)use of GitHub Actions: it runs a scheduled action to check the availability of sites that you specify, records the results in a YAML file (with the commit history tracking them over time) and can automatically open a GitHub issue for you if it detects a new incident.
Weeknotes: Building Datasette Cloud on Fly Machines, Furo for documentation
Hosting provider Fly released Fly Machines this week. I got an early preview and I’ve been working with it for a few days—it’s a fascinating new piece of technology. I’m using it to get my hosting service for Datasette ready for wider release.
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