Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Thursday, 26th May 2022

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.

[... 1005 words]

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. # 3:53 am

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! # 3:40 am

2022 » May

MTWTFSS
      1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031