Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Items tagged weeknotes in 2020

Filters: Year: 2020 × weeknotes × Sorted by date


Weeknotes: Datasette 0.43

My main achievement this week was shipping Datasette 0.43, with a collection of smaller improvements and one big one: a redesign of the register_output_renderer plugin hook.

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Using SQL to find my best photo of a pelican according to Apple Photos

According to the Apple Photos internal SQLite database, this is the most aesthetically pleasing photograph I have ever taken of a pelican:

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Weeknotes: Working on my screenplay

I’m taking an Introduction to Screenwriting course with Adam Tobin at Stanford, and my partial screenplay is due this week. I’m pulling together some scenes that tell the story of the Russian 1917 February Revolution and the fall of the Tsar through the lens of the craftsmen working on the Tsar’s last Fabergé egg. So I’ve not been spending much time on anything else.

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Weeknotes: Datasette 0.41, photos breakthroughs

Shorter weeknotes this week, because my main project for the week warrants a detailed write-up on its own (coming soon... update 21st May here it is).

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Weeknotes: Archiving coronavirus.data.gov.uk, custom pages and directory configuration in Datasette, photos-to-sqlite

I mainly made progress on three projects this week: Datasette, photos-to-sqlite and a cleaner way of archiving data to a git repository.

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Weeknotes: Datasette 0.40, various projects, Dogsheep photos

A new release of Datasette, two new projects and progress towards a Dogsheep photos solution.

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Weeknotes: Hacking on 23 different projects

I wrote a lot of code this week: 184 commits over 23 repositories! I’ve also started falling for Zeit Now v2, having found workarounds for some of my biggest problems with it.

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Goodbye Zeit Now v1, hello datasette-publish-now—and talking to myself in GitHub issues

This week I’ve been mostly dealing with the finally announced shutdown of Zeit Now v1. And having long-winded conversations with myself in GitHub issues.

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Weeknotes: Covid-19, First Python Notebook, more Dogsheep, Tailscale

My covid-19.datasettes.com project publishes information on COVID-19 cases around the world. The project started out using data from Johns Hopkins CSSE, but last week the New York Times started publishing high quality USA county- and state-level daily numbers to their own repository. Here’s the change that added the NY Times data.

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Weeknotes: Datasette 0.39 and many other projects

This week’s theme: Well, I’m not going anywhere. So a ton of progress to report on various projects.

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Weeknotes: this week was absurd

As of this morning, San Francisco is in a legally mandated shelter-in-place. I can hardly remember what life was like seven days ago. It’s been a very long, very crazy week. This was not a great week for getting stuff done.

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Weeknotes: COVID-19 numbers in Datasette

COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, gets more terrifying every day. Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) have been collating data about the spread of the disease and publishing it as CSV files on GitHub.

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Weeknotes: datasette-ics, datasette-upload-csvs, datasette-configure-fts, asgi-csrf

I’ve been preparing for the NICAR 2020 Data Journalism conference this week which has lead me into a flurry of activity across a plethora of different projects and plugins.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Writes

As discussed previously, the biggest hole in Datasette’s feature set at the moment involves writing to the database.

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Things I learned about shapefiles building shapefile-to-sqlite

The latest in my series of x-to-sqlite tools is shapefile-to-sqlite. I learned a whole bunch of things about the ESRI shapefile format while building it.

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How to cheat at unit tests with pytest and Black

I’ve been making a lot of progress on Datasette Cloud this week. As an application that provides private hosted Datasette instances (initially targeted at data journalists and newsrooms) the majority of the code I’ve written deals with permissions: allowing people to form teams, invite team members, promote and demote team administrators and suchlike.

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Weeknotes: Shaving yaks for Datasette Cloud

I’ve been shaving a lot of yaks, but I’m finally ready to for other people to start kicking the tires on the MVP of Datasette Cloud.

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Weeknotes: datasette-auth-existing-cookies and datasette-sentry

Work on Datasette Cloud continues—I’m tantalizingly close to having a MVP I can start to invite people to try out.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud and zero downtime deployments

Yesterday’s piece on Tracking FARA by deploying a data API using GitHub Actions and Cloud Run was originally intended to be my weeknotes, but ended up getting a bit too involved.

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Weeknotes: Improv at Stanford, planning Datasette Cloud

Last week was the first week of the quarter at Stanford—which is called “shopping week” here because students are expected to try different classes to see which ones they are going to stick with.

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Building a sitemap.xml with a one-off Datasette plugin

One of the fun things about launching a new website is re-learning what it takes to promote a website from scratch on the modern web. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying using Niche Museums as an excuse to explore 2020-era SEO.

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