Blogmarks
Filters: Sorted by date
Happy Birthday Sea Lions! (via) Today, June 15th, is Sea Lion birthday—half of all California Sea Lions are born today thanks to clever co-ordinated delayed implantation by Sea Lion females. Natalie has started making nature videos and I’ve been tagging along as her camera-person—this three minute video, shot at Pier 39 in San Francisco, celebrates Sea Lion birthday and explains how it works.
Tip for changing cookie subdomains: change the cookie name too. This is a really useful tip I hadn’t encountered before. If you make a change to the way cookies are configured—changing the cookie domain or path for example—it’s a good idea to change the name of the cookie as well. If you don’t change the cookie name you’ll see weird behaviour for users who have previously had the cookie set using the older configuration. This definitely explains bugs I’ve seen in the past. Filing this tip away for future cookie-related development work.
Apple password-manager-resources (via) Apple maintain on open source repository full of heuristics for implementing smart password managers. It lists password rules for different sites (e.g. min/max length, special characters required), change password URLs for different services and sites that share credential backends—like icloud.com and apple.com. They accept pull requests!
A List of Hacker News’s Undocumented Features and Behaviors (via) If you’re interested in community software design this is a neat insight into the many undocumented features of Hacker News, collated by Max Woolf.
Working Backwards: A New Version Of Amazon’s “Press Release” Approach To Plan Customer-Centric Projects (via) I’ve long wanted to give the Amazon “future press release” trick a go—start a project by writing the imaginary press release that would announce that project to the world, in order to focus on understanding what the project is for and how it will deliver value. Jeff Gothelf has put a lot of thought into this and constructed a thorough looking template for writing one of these that covers a number of different important project aspects.
Get Started—Materialize. Materialize is a really interesting new database—“a streaming SQL materialized view engine”. It builds materialized views on top of streaming data sources (such as Kafka)—you define the view using a SQL query, then it figures out how to keep that view up-to-date automatically as new data streams in. It speaks the PostgreSQL protocol so you can talk to it using the psql tool or any PostgreSQL client library. The “get started” guide is particularly impressive: it uses a curl stream of the Wikipedia recent changes API, parsed using a regular expression. And it’s written in Rust, so installing it is as easy as downloading and executing a single binary (though I used Homebrew).
Practical Python Programming (via) David Beazley has been developing and presenting this three day Python course (aimed at people with some prior programming experience) for over thirteen years, and he’s just released the course materials under a Creative Commons license for the first time.
Deno is a Browser for Code (via) One of the most interesting ideas in Deno is that code imports are loaded directly from URLs—which can themselves depend on other URL-based packages. On first encounter it feels wrong—obviously insecure. Deno contributor Kitson Kelly provides a deeper exploration of the idea, and explains how the combination of caching and lock files makes it no less secure than code installed from npm or PyPI.
Advice on specifying more granular permissions with Google Cloud IAM (via) My single biggest frustration working with both Google Cloud and AWS is permissions: more specifically, figuring out what the smallest set of permissions are that I need to assign in order to achieve different goals. Katie McLaughlin’s new series aims to address exactly that problem. I learned a ton from this that I’ve previously missed, and there’s plenty of actionable advice on tooling that can be used to help figure this stuff out.
Why we use homework to recruit engineers. Ad Hoc run a remote-first team, and use detailed homework assignments as part of their interview process in place of in-person technical interview. The homework assignments are really interesting to browse through—“Containerize” for example involves building a Docker container to run a Python app with nginx a and a modern cipher suite. I’m nervous about the extra burden this places on candidates, but Ad Hoc address that: “We recognize that we’re asking folks to invest time into our process, but we feel like our homework compares favorably to extensive on-site interviews or other evaluation techniques, especially for candidates who have responsibilities outside of their work life.”
AWS services explained in one line each (via) Impressive effort to summarize all 163(!) AWS services—this helped clarify a whole bunch that I haven’t figured yet. Only a few defeated the author, with a single question mark for the description. I enjoyed Amazon Braket: “Some quantum thing. It’s in preview so I have no idea what it is.”
Serving photos locally with datasette-media. datasette-media is a new Datasette plugin which can serve static files from disk in response to a configured SQL query that maps incoming URL parameters to a path to a file. I built it so I could run dogsheep-photos locally on my laptop and serve up thumbnails of images that match particular queries. I’ve added documentation to the dogsheep-photos README explaining how to use datasette-media, datasette-json-html and datasette-template-sql to create custom interfaces onto Apple Photos data on your machine.
Waiting in asyncio. Handy cheatsheet explaining the differences between asyncio.gather(), asyncio.wait_for(), asyncio.as_completed() and asyncio.wait() by Hynek Schlawack.
Using SQL to Look Through All of Your iMessage Text Messages (via) Dan Kelch shows how to access the iMessage SQLite database at ~/Library/Messages/chat.db—it’s protected under macOS Catalina so you have to enable Full Disk Access in the privacy settings first. I usually use the macOS terminal app but I installed iTerm for this because I’d rather enable full disk access to a separate terminal program than let anything I’m running in my regular terminal take advantage of it. It worked! Now I can run “datasette ~/Library/Messages/chat.db” to browse my messages.
Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage (via) In which a Pizza restaurant owner notices that Doordash, uninvited, have started offering their $24 pizzas for $16 and starts ordering their own pizzas and keeping the difference.
Deno 1.0. Deno is a new take on server-side JavaScript from a team lead by Ryan Dahl, who originally created Node.js. It’s built using Rust and crammed with fascinating ideas—like the ability to import code directly from a URL.
Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY (via) Beautiful piece of writing by Saagar Jha. “Ultimately, however, our decision to switch was driven by our difficulty in hiring new talent for $UNREMARKABLE_LANGUAGE, despite it being taught in dozens of universities across the United States. Our blog posts on $PRACTICAL_OPEN_SOURCE_FRAMEWORK seemed to get fewer upvotes when posted on Reddit as well, cementing our conviction that our technology stack was now legacy code.”
Data Journalism Academy (via) MaryJo Webster is the data editor for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, and a 2019 Pulitzer nominee. She’s has a huge amount of experience teaching data journalism and has just released her accumulated teaching materials in the form of the Data Journalism Academy.
pyp: Easily run Python at the shell (via) Fascinating little CLI utility which uses some deeply clever AST introspection to enable little Python one-liners that act as replacements for all manner of pipe-oriented unix utilities. Took me a while to understand how it works from the README, but then I looked at the code and the entire thing is only 380 lines long. There’s also a useful --explain option which outputs the Python source code that it would execute for a given command.
Datasette table diagram, now with a DOT graph (via) Thomas Ballinger shared a huge improvement to my Observable notebook for rendering a diagram of a collection of Datasette tables. He showed how to use the DOT language to render a full schema digram with arrows joining together the different tables. I’ve applied his changes to my notebook.
html-to-svg (via) This is absolutely ingenious: 50 lines of JavaScript which uses Puppeteer to get headless Chrome to grab a PDF screenshot of a page, then shells out to Inkscape to convert the PDF to SVG. Wraps the whole thing up in a Docker container and ships it to Cloud Run as a web service you can call by passing it a URL.
A hands-on introduction to static code analysis. Useful tutorial on using the Python standard library tokenize and ast modules to find specific patterns in Python source code, using the visitor pattern.
How to get Rich with Python (a terminal rendering library). Will McGugan introduces Rich, his new Python library for rendering content on the terminal. This is a very cool piece of software—out of the box it supports coloured text, emoji, tables, rendering Markdown, syntax highlighting code, rendering Python tracebacks, progress bars and more. “pip install rich” and then “python -m rich” to render a “test card” demo demonstrating the features of the library.
How to install and upgrade Datasette using pipx (via) I’ve been using pipx to run Datasette for a while now—it’s a neat Python packaging tool which installs a Python CLI command with all of its dependencies in its own isolated virtual environment. Today, thanks to Twitter, I figured out how to install and upgrade plugins in the same environment—so I added a section to the Datasette installation documentation about it.
github-to-sqlite 2.2 highlights thread. I released github-to-sqlite 2.2 today with a new “stargazers” command for importing users who have starred one or more specific repositories. This Twitter thread lists highlights of recent releases and links to a live Datasette demo that shows what the tool can do.
Bill Gates’s vision for life beyond the coronavirus. Fascinating interview with Bill Gates—the most interesting and informative article I’ve read about Covid-19 in quite a while.
Restricting SSH connections to devices within a Tailscale network. TIL how to run SSH on a VPS instance (in this case Amazon Lightsail) such that it can only be SSHd to by devices connected to a private Tailscale VPN.
98.css (via) This is pretty beautiful: a CSS library that meticulously styles HTML form elements to look like the Windows 98 interface.
Estimating COVID-19’s Rt in Real-Time. I’m not qualified to comment on the mathematical approach, but this is a really nice example of a Jupyter Notebook explanatory essay by Kevin Systrom.
How Super Graph compiles GraphQL to a single SQL query. Super Graph is a GraphQL server that compiles arbitrarily nested GraphQL queries to “a single fast SQL query”. I’ve always wondered how that could possible work, so I asked author Vikram Rangnekar for an example of a compiled query—it turns out it uses a brilliant sequence of JSON aggregations to glue together results from nested subqueries and left outer joins.