Wednesday, 31st January 2024
GitHub Actions: Introducing the new M1 macOS runner available to open source! Set “runs-on: macos-14” to run a GitHub Actions workflow on a 7GB of RAM ARM M1 runner. I have been looking forward to this for ages: it should make it much easier to build releases of both Electron apps and Python binary wheels for Apple Silicon.
Macaroons Escalated Quickly (via) Thomas Ptacek’s follow-up on Macaroon tokens, based on a two year project to implement them at Fly.io. The way they let end users calculate new signed tokens with additional limitations applied to them (“caveats” in Macaroon terminology) is fascinating, and allows for some very creative solutions.
snoop. Neat Python debugging utility by Alex Hall: snoop lets you “import snoop” and then add “@snoop” as a decorator to any function, which causes that function’s source code to be output directly to the console with details of any variable state changes that occur while it’s running.
I didn’t know you could make a Python module callable like that—turns out it’s running “sys.modules[’snoop’] = snoop” in the __init__.py module!
stanchion (via) Dan Gallagher’s new (under-development) SQLite extension that adds column-oriented tables to SQLite, using a virtual table implemented in Zig that stores records in row groups, where each row group has multiple segments (one for each column) and those segments are stored as SQLite BLOBs.
I’m surprised that this is possible using the virtual table mechanism. It has the potential to bring some of the analytical querying performance we’ve seen in engines like DuckDB to SQLite itself.