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Litestream backups for Datasette Cloud (and weeknotes)
My main focus this week has been adding robust backups to the forthcoming Datasette Cloud.
[... 1,604 words]Weeknotes: Joining the board of the Python Software Foundation
A few weeks ago I was elected to the board of directors for the Python Software Foundation.
[... 2,081 words]Weeknotes: Datasette, sqlite-utils, Datasette Desktop
A flurry of releases this week, including a new Datasette alpha and a fixed Datasette Desktop.
[... 1,113 words]sqlite-comprehend: run AWS entity extraction against content in a SQLite database
I built a new tool this week: sqlite-comprehend, which passes text from a SQLite database through the AWS Comprehend entity extraction service and stores the returned entities.
[... 1,146 words]Using GPT-3 to explain how code works
One of my favourite uses for the GPT-3 AI language model is generating explanations of how code works. It’s shockingly effective at this: its training set clearly include a vast amount of source code.
[... 1,983 words]s3-ocr: Extract text from PDF files stored in an S3 bucket
I’ve released s3-ocr, a new tool that runs Amazon’s Textract OCR text extraction against PDF files in an S3 bucket, then writes the resulting text out to a SQLite database with full-text search configured so you can run searches against the extracted data.
[... 1,493 words]First impressions of DALL-E, generating images from text
I made it off the DALL-E waiting list a few days ago and I’ve been having an enormous amount of fun experimenting with it. Here are some notes on what I’ve learned so far (and a bunch of example images too).
[... 2,102 words]Joining CSV files in your browser using Datasette Lite
I added a new feature to Datasette Lite—my version of Datasette that runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly (previously): you can now use it to load one or more CSV files by URL, and then run SQL queries against them—including joins across data from multiple files.
[... 546 words]Weeknotes: datasette-socrata, and the last 10%...
... takes 90% of the work. I continue to work towards a preview of the new Datasette Cloud, and keep finding new “just one more things” to delay inviting in users.
[... 1,214 words]Twenty years of my blog
I started this blog on June 12th 2002—twenty years ago today! To celebrate two decades of blogging, I decided to pull together some highlights and dive down a self-indulgent nostalgia hole.
[... 4,455 words]A tiny web app to create images from OpenStreetMap maps
Earlier today I found myself wanting to programmatically generate some images of maps.
[... 1,388 words]Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud ready to preview
I made an absolute ton of progress building Datasette Cloud on Fly this week, and also had a bunch of fun playing with GPT-3.
[... 370 words]How to use the GPT-3 language model
I ran a Twitter poll the other day asking if people had tried GPT-3 and why or why not. The winning option, by quite a long way, was “No, I don’t know how to”. So here’s how to try it out, for free, without needing to write any code.
[... 838 words]A Datasette tutorial written by GPT-3
I’ve been playing around with OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model playground for a few months now. It’s a fascinating piece of software. You can sign up here—apparently there’s no longer a waiting list.
[... 1,244 words]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.
[... 1,005 words]Bundling binary tools in Python wheels
I spotted a new (to me) pattern which I think is pretty interesting: projects are bundling compiled binary applications as part of their Python packaging wheels. I think it’s really neat.
[... 903 words]Weeknotes: Camping, a road trip and two new museums
Natalie and I took a week-long road trip and camping holiday. The plan was to camp on Santa Rosa Island in the California Channel Islands, but the boat to the island was cancelled due to bad weather. We treated ourselves to a Central Californian road trip instead.
[... 872 words]Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, nogil Python, HYTRADBOI
My big project this week was Datasette Lite, a new way to run Datasette directly in a browser, powered by WebAssembly and Pyodide. I also continued my research into running SQL queries in parallel, described last week. Plus I spoke at HYTRADBOI.
[... 1,434 words]Datasette Lite: a server-side Python web application running in a browser
Datasette Lite is a new way to run Datasette: entirely in a browser, taking advantage of the incredible Pyodide project which provides Python compiled to WebAssembly plus a whole suite of useful extras.
[... 4,800 words]Automatically opening issues when tracked file content changes
I figured out a GitHub Actions pattern to keep track of a file published somewhere on the internet and automatically open a new repository issue any time the contents of that file changes.
[... 1,211 words]Weeknotes: Parallel SQL queries for Datasette, plus some middleware tricks
A promising new performance optimization for Datasette, plus new datasette-gzip and datasette-total-page-time plugins.
Useful tricks with pip install URL and GitHub
The pip install command can accept a URL to a zip file or tarball. GitHub provides URLs that can create a zip file of any branch, tag or commit in any repository. Combining these is a really useful trick for maintaining Python packages.
Building a Covid sewage Twitter bot (and other weeknotes)
I built a new Twitter bot today: @covidsewage. It tweets a daily screenshot of the latest Covid sewage monitoring data published by Santa Clara county.
[... 1,079 words]Pillar Point Stewards, pypi-to-sqlite, improvements to shot-scraper and appreciating datasette-dashboards
This week I helped Natalie launch the Pillar Point Stewards website and built a new tool for loading PyPI package data into SQLite, in order to help promote the excellent datasette-dashboards plugin by Romain Clement.
[... 1,985 words]Weeknotes: datasette-auth0
Datasette 0.61, a Twitter Space and a new Datasette plugin for authenticating against Auth0.
[... 957 words]Datasette 0.61: The annotated release notes
I released Datasette 0.61 this morning—closely followed by 0.61.1 to fix a minor bug. Here are the annotated release notes.
[... 1,465 words]SQLite Happy Hour—a Twitter Spaces conversation about three interesting projects building on SQLite
Yesterday I hosted SQLite Happy Hour. my first conversation using Twitter Spaces. The idea was to dig into three different projects that were doing interesting things on top of SQLite. I think it worked pretty well, and I’m curious to explore this format more in the future.
[... 1,998 words]Weeknotes: Tildes not dashes, and the big refactor
After last week’s shot-scraper distractions with Playwright, this week I finally managed to make some concrete progress on the path towards Datasette 1.0.
[... 1,292 words]Instantly create a GitHub repository to take screenshots of a web page
I just released shot-scraper-template, a GitHub repository template that helps you start taking automated screenshots of a web page by filling out a form.
[... 1,177 words]Scraping web pages from the command line with shot-scraper
I’ve added a powerful new capability to my shot-scraper command line browser automation tool: you can now use it to load a web page in a headless browser, execute JavaScript to extract information and return that information back to the terminal as JSON.
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