Blogmarks in Dec, 2020
Filters: Type: blogmark × Year: 2020 × Month: Dec × Sorted by date
Replicating SQLite with rqlite (via) I’ve been trying out rqlite, a “lightweight, distributed relational database, which uses SQLite as its storage engine”. It’s written in Go and uses the Raft consensus algorithm to allow a cluster of nodes to elect a leader and replicate SQLite statements between them. By default it uses in-memory SQLite databases with an on-disk Raft replication log—here are my notes on running it in “on disk” mode as a way to run multiple Datasette processes against replicated SQLite database files. # 28th December 2020, 7:51 pm
Datasette Weekly: Official project website for Datasette, building a search engine with Dogsheep Beta, sqlite-utils analyze-tables (via) Volume 5 of the Datasette Weekly-ish newsletter. # 23rd December 2020, 11:52 pm
How Shopify Uses WebAssembly Outside of the Browser (via) I’m fascinated by applications of WebAssembly outside the browser. As a Python programmer I’m excited to see native code libraries getting compiled to WASM in a way that lets me call them from Python code via a bridge, but the other interesting application is executing untrusted code in a sandbox.
Shopify are doing exactly that—they are building a kind-of plugin mechanism where partner code compiled to WASM runs inside their architecture using Fastly’s Lucet. The performance numbers are in the same ballpark as native code.
Also interesting: they’re recommending AssemblyScript, a TypeScript-style language designed to compile directly to WASM without needing any additional interpreter support, as required by dynamic languages such as JavaScript, Python or Ruby. # 19th December 2020, 4:46 pm
Commits are snapshots, not diffs (via) Useful, clearly explained revision of some Git fundamentals. # 17th December 2020, 10:01 pm
datasette.io (via) Datasette finally has an official project website, three years after the first release of the software. I built it using Datasette, with custom templates to define the various pages. The site includes news, latest releases, example sites and a new searchable plugin directory. # 11th December 2020, 4:11 am
Deno 1.6 Release Notes. Two signature features in Deno 1.6 worth paying attention to: a built-in language server for code editors like VS Code, and the “deno compile” command which can build Deno JavaScript/TypeScript projects into standalone binaries. The ability to build binaries has turned out to be a killer feature of both Go and Rust, so seeing it ship as a default capability of a interpreted dynamic language is fascinating. I would love it if Python followed Deno’s example. # 10th December 2020, 1:25 am
The case against client certificates (via) Colm MacCárthaigh provides a passionately argued Twitter thread about client certificates and why they should be avoided. I tried using them as an extra layer of protection fir my personal Dogsheep server and ended up abandoning them—certificate management across my devices was too fiddly. # 9th December 2020, 2:41 pm
Cameras and Lenses (via) Fabulous explotable interactive essay by Bartosz Ciechanowski explaining how cameras and lenses work. # 8th December 2020, 3:38 am
The secrets of Monkey Island’s source code (via) To celebrate the thirty year anniversary of the Secret of Monkey Island the Video Game History Foundation interviewed developer Rod Gilbert and produced this comprehensive collection of cut content and material showing how the game was originally constructed. # 5th December 2020, 4:32 pm
Command Line Interface Guidelines (via) Aanand Prasad, Ben Firshman, Carl Tashian and Eva Parish provide the missing manual for designing CLI tools in 2020. Deeply researched and clearly presented—I picked up a bunch of useful tips and ideas from reading this, and I’m looking forward to applying them to my own CLI projects. # 4th December 2020, 8:44 pm
Scaling Datastores at Slack with Vitess (via) Slack spent three years migrating 99% of their MySQL query load to run against Vitess, the open source MySQL sharding system originally built by YouTube. “Today, we serve 2.3 million QPS at peak. 2M of those queries are reads and 300K are writes. Our median query latency is 2 ms, and our p99 query latency is 11 ms.” # 1st December 2020, 9:30 pm
New for AWS Lambda – Container Image Support. “You can now package and deploy Lambda functions as container images of up to 10 GB in size”—can’t wait to try this out with Datasette. # 1st December 2020, 5:34 pm