Wednesday, 9th November 2022
Designing a write API for Datasette
Building out Datasette Cloud has made one thing clear to me: Datasette needs a write API for ingesting new data into its attached SQLite databases.
[... 1,493 words]Inside the mind of a frontend developer: Hero section. Ahmad Shadeed provides a fascinating, hyper-detailed breakdown of his approach to implementing a “hero section” component using HTML and CSS, including notes on CSS grids and gradient backgrounds.
Semantic text search using embeddings. Example Python notebook from OpenAI demonstrating how to build a search engine using embeddings rather than straight up token matching. This is a fascinating way of implementing search, providing results that match the intent of the search (“delicious beans” for example) even if none of the keywords are actually present in the text.
PyScript Updates: Bytecode Alliance, Pyodide, and MicroPython. Absolutely huge news about Python on the Web tucked into this announcement: Anaconda have managed to get a version of MicroPython compiled to WebAssembly running in the browser. Pyodide weighs in at around 6.5MB compressed, but the MicroPython build is just 303KB—the size of a large image. This makes Python in the web browser applicable to so many more potential areas.