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Fast Autocomplete Search for Your Website
Every website deserves a great search engine—but building a search engine can be a lot of work, and hosting it can quickly get expensive.
[... 4,159 words]Building smaller Python Docker images
Changes are afoot at Zeit Now, my preferred hosting provider for the past year (see previous posts). They have announced Now 2.0, an intriguing new approach to providing auto-scaling immutable deployments. It’s built on top of lambdas, and comes with a whole host of new constraints: code needs to fit into a 5MB bundle for example (though it looks like this restriction will soon be relaxed a little—update November 19th you can now bump this up to 50MB).
[... 1,872 words]Automatically playing science communication games with transfer learning and fastai
This weekend was the 9th annual Science Hack Day San Francisco, which was also the 100th Science Hack Day held worldwide.
[... 1,174 words]How to Instantly Publish Data to the Internet with Datasette
I spoke about my Datasette project at PyBay in August and they’ve just posted the video of my talk.
[... 58 words]How I moderated the State of Django panel at DjangoCon US.
On Wednesday last week I moderated the State of Django panel as the closing session for DjangoCon US 2018.
[... 1,210 words]The interesting ideas in Datasette
Datasette (previously) is my open source tool for exploring and publishing structured data. There are a lot of ideas embedded in Datasette. I realized that I haven’t put many of them into writing.
[... 2,857 words]Letterboxing on Lundy
Last week Natalie and I spent a delightful two days with our friends Hannah and Adam on the beautiful island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel, 12 miles off the coast of North Devon.
[... 1,461 words]The subset of reStructuredText worth committing to memory
reStructuredText is the standard for documentation in the Python world.
[... 1,186 words]How to Instantly Publish Data to the Internet with Datasette
I presented a session about Datasette at the PyBay 2018 conference in San Francisco. I talked about the project itself and demonstrated ways of creating and publishing databases using csvs-to-sqlite, Datasette Publish and my new sqlite-utils library.
[... 2,043 words]Analyzing US Election Russian Facebook Ads
Two interesting data sources have emerged in the past few weeks concerning the Russian impact on the 2016 US elections.
[... 922 words]Analyzing US Election troll tweets with Datasette
FiveThirtyEight published nearly 3 million tweets from accounts associated with the Russian “Internet Research Agency”, based on research by Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren at at Clemson University.
[... 110 words]Datasette Facets
Datasette 0.22 is out with the most significant new feature I’ve added since the initial release: faceted browse.
[... 1,189 words]Notes from my appearance on the Changelog podcast
After I spoke at Zeit Day SF last weekend I sat down with Adam Stacoviak to record a 25 minute segment for episode 296 of the Changelog podcast, talking about Datasette. We covered a lot of ground!
[... 536 words]Exploring the UK Register of Members Interests with SQL and Datasette
Ever wondered which UK Members of Parliament get gifted the most helicopter rides? How about which MPs have been given Christmas hampers by the Sultan of Brunei? (David Cameron, William Hague and Michael Howard apparently). Here’s how to dig through the Register of Members Interests using SQL and Datasette.
[... 1,167 words]Datasette plugins, and building a clustered map visualization
Datasette now supports plugins!
[... 751 words]Building a combined stream of recent additions using the Django ORM
I’m a big believer in the importance of a “recent additions” feed. Any time you’re building an application that involves users adding and editing records it’s useful to have a page somewhere that shows the most recent objects that have been created across multiple different types of data.
[... 1,647 words]Datasette Demo (video) from the SF Python Meetup
I gave a short talk about Datasette last month at the SF Python Meetup Holiday Party. They’ve just posted the video, so here it is:
[... 63 words]Analyzing my Twitter followers with Datasette
I decided to do some ad-hoc analsis of my social network on Twitter this afternoon… and since everything is more fun if you bundle it up into a SQLite database and publish it to the internet I performed the analysis using Datasette.
[... 1,314 words]Datasette Publish: a web app for publishing CSV files as an online database
I’ve just released Datasette Publish, a web tool for turning one or more CSV files into an online database with a JSON API.
[... 863 words]Building a location to time zone API with SpatiaLite, OpenStreetMap and Datasette
Given a latitude and longitude, how can we tell what time zone that point lies within? Here’s how I built a simple JSON API to answer that question, using a combination of data from OpenStreetMap, the SpatiaLite extension for SQLite and my Datasette API tool.
[... 2,185 words]New in Datasette: filters, foreign keys and search
I’ve released Datasette 0.13 with a number of exciting new features (Datasette previously).
[... 1,143 words]Datasette: instantly create and publish an API for your SQLite databases
I just shipped the first public version of datasette, a new tool for creating and publishing JSON APIs for SQLite databases.
[... 968 words]Running a load testing Go utility using Docker for Mac
I’m playing around with Zeit Now at the moment (see my previous entry) and decided to hit it with some traffic using Apache Bench. I got this SSL handshake error:
[... 818 words]Using “import refs” to iteratively import data into Django
I’ve been writing a few scripts to backfill my blog with content I originally posted elsewhere. So far I’ve imported answers I posted on Quora (background), answers I posted on Ask MetaFilter and content I recovered from the Internet Archive.
[... 559 words]Late night dining near Great American Music Hall
Tommy’s Joynt is a couple of blocks away and is a San Francisco institution—great comfort food, inexpensive, crammed with personality and open late.
[... 40 words]Porting my blog to Python 3
This blog is now running on Python 3! Admittedly this is nearly nine years after the first release of Python 3.0, but it’s the first Python 3 project I’ve deployed myself so I’m pretty excited about it.
[... 883 words]How to set up world-class continuous deployment using free hosted tools
I’m going to describe a way to put together a world-class continuous deployment infrastructure for your side-project without spending any money.
[... 1,294 words]Deploying an asynchronous Python microservice with Sanic and Zeit Now
Back in 2008 Natalie Downe and I deployed what today we would call a microservice: json-head, a tiny Google App Engine app that allowed you to make an HTTP head request against a URL and get back the HTTP headers as JSON. One of our initial use-scase for this was Natalie’s addSizes.js, an unobtrusive jQuery script that could annotate links to PDFs and other large files with their corresponding file size pulled from the Content-Length header. Another potential use-case is detecting broken links, since the API can be used to spot 404 status codes (as in this example).
Changelogs to help understand the fires in the North Bay
The situation in the counties north of San Francisco is horrifying right now. I’ve repurposed some of the tools I built to for the Irma Response project last month to collect and track some data that might be of use to anyone trying to understand what’s happening up there. I’m sharing these now in the hope that they might prove useful.
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