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2022 in projects and blogging

In lieu of my regular weeknotes (I took two weeks off for the holidays) here’s a look back at 2022, mainly in terms of projects and things I’ve written about.

Designing a write API for Datasette

Building out Datasette Cloud has made one thing clear to me: Datasette needs a write API for ingesting new data into its attached SQLite databases.

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Weeknotes: DjangoCon, SQLite in Django, datasette-gunicorn

I spent most of this week at DjangoCon in San Diego—my first outside-of-the-Bay-Area conference since the before-times.

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Weeknotes: Publishing data using Datasette Cloud

My initial preview releases of Datasette Cloud (the SaaS version of my Datasette open source project) have focused on private data collaboration.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud preview invitations

Visit Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud preview invitations

This week I finally started sending out invitations for people to try out the preview of the new Datasette Cloud, my SaaS offering for Datasette.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, s3-credentials, shot-scraper, datasette-edit-templates and more

Visit Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, s3-credentials, shot-scraper, datasette-edit-templates and more

Despite distractions from AI I managed to make progress on a bunch of different projects this week, including new releases of s3-credentials and shot-scraper, a new datasette-edit-templates plugin and a small but neat improvement to Datasette Lite.

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Building a searchable archive for the San Francisco Microscopical Society

Visit Building a searchable archive for the San Francisco Microscopical Society

The San Francisco Microscopical Society was founded in 1870 by a group of scientists dedicated to advancing the field of microscopy.

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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.

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s3-ocr: Extract text from PDF files stored in an S3 bucket

Visit 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.

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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.

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Weeknotes: Building Datasette Cloud on Fly Machines, Furo for documentation

Visit 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.

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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.

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Building a Covid sewage Twitter bot (and other weeknotes)

Visit 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.

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Pillar Point Stewards, pypi-to-sqlite, improvements to shot-scraper and appreciating datasette-dashboards

Visit 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.

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Google Drive to SQLite

Visit Google Drive to SQLite

I released a new tool this week: google-drive-to-sqlite. It’s a CLI utility for fetching metadata about files in your Google Drive and writing them to a local SQLite database.

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Help scraping: track changes to CLI tools by recording their --help using Git

Visit Help scraping: track changes to CLI tools by recording their --help using Git

I’ve been experimenting with a new variant of Git scraping this week which I’m calling Help scraping. The key idea is to track changes made to CLI tools over time by recording the output of their --help commands in a Git repository.

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What’s new in sqlite-utils 3.20 and 3.21: --lines, --text, --convert

sqlite-utils is my combined CLI tool and Python library for manipulating SQLite databases. Consider this the annotated release notes for sqlite-utils 3.20 and 3.21, both released in the past week.

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Weeknotes: datasette-tiddlywiki, filters_from_request

Visit Weeknotes: datasette-tiddlywiki, filters_from_request

I made some good progress on the big refactor this week, including extracting some core logic out into a new Datasette plugin hook. I also got distracted by TiddlyWiki and released a new Datasette plugin that lets you run TiddlyWiki inside Datasette.

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Weeknotes: Shaving some beautiful yaks

Visit Weeknotes: Shaving some beautiful yaks

I’ve been mostly shaving yaks this week—two in particular: the Datasette table refactor and the next release of git-history. I also built and released my first Web Component!

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Weeknotes: git-history, created for a Git scraping workshop

Visit Weeknotes: git-history, created for a Git scraping workshop

My main project this week was a 90 minute workshop I delivered about Git scraping at Coda.Br 2021, a Brazilian data journalism conference, on Friday. This inspired the creation of a brand new tool, git-history, plus smaller improvements to a range of other projects.

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Weeknotes: datasette-jupyterlite, s3-credentials and a Python packaging talk

Visit Weeknotes: datasette-jupyterlite, s3-credentials and a Python packaging talk

My big project this week was s3-credentials, described yesterday—but I also put together a fun expermiental Datasette plugin bundling JupyterLite and wrote up my PyGotham talk on Python packaging.

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Weeknotes: CDC vaccination history fixes, developing in GitHub Codespaces

I spent the last week mostly surrounded by boxes: we’re completing our move to the new place and life is mostly unpacking now. I did find some time to fix some issues with my CDC vaccination history Datasette instance though.

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Weeknotes number 100

This entry marks my 100th weeknotes, which I’ve managed to post once a week (plus or minus a few days) consistently since 13th September 2019.

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Datasette Desktop—a macOS desktop application for Datasette

Visit Datasette Desktop - a macOS desktop application for Datasette

I just released version 0.1.0 of the new Datasette macOS desktop application, the first version that end-users can easily install. I would very much appreciate your help testing it out!

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Building a desktop application for Datasette (and weeknotes)

Visit Building a desktop application for Datasette (and weeknotes)

This week I started experimenting with a desktop application version of Datasette—with the goal of providing people who aren’t comfortable with the command-line the ability to get Datasette up and running on their own personal computers.

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Apply conversion functions to data in SQLite columns with the sqlite-utils CLI tool

Visit Apply conversion functions to data in SQLite columns with the sqlite-utils CLI tool

Earlier this week I released sqlite-utils 3.14 with a powerful new command-line tool: sqlite-utils convert, which applies a conversion function to data stored in a SQLite column.

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Weeknotes: datasette-remote-metadata, sqlite-transform --multi

I mentioned Project Pelican (still a codename until the end of the embargo) last week. This week it inspired a new plugin, datasette-remote-metadata.

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Weeknotes: sqlite-transform 1.1, Datasette 0.58.1, datasette-graphql 1.5

Work on Project Pelican inspires new features and improvements across a number of different projects.

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Django SQL Dashboard 1.0

Visit Django SQL Dashboard 1.0

Earlier this week I released Django SQL Dashboard 1.0. I also just released 1.0.1, with a bug fix for PostgreSQL 10 contributed by Ryan Cheley.

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Joining CSV and JSON data with an in-memory SQLite database

Visit Joining CSV and JSON data with an in-memory SQLite database

The new sqlite-utils memory command can import CSV and JSON data directly into an in-memory SQLite database, combine and query it using SQL and output the results as CSV, JSON or various other formats of plain text tables.

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