Simon Willison’s Weblog

Understanding a Protocol. Andrew’s latest notes on how ActivityPub and Mastodon work under the hood, based on his extensive development work building out Takahē. # 6th December 2022, 12:50 am

Django: Added support for asynchronous views and middleware (via) An enormously consequential feature just landed in Django, and is set to ship as part of Django 3.1 in August. Asynchronous views will allow Django applications to define views using “async def myview(request)”—taking full advantage of Python’s growing asyncio ecosystem and providing enormous performance improvements for Django sites that do things like hitting APIs over HTTP. Andrew has been puzzling over this for ages and it’s really exciting to see it land in a form that should be usable in a stable Django release in just a few months. # 19th March 2020, 3:43 am

Andrew Godwin’s www-router Docker container (via) Really clever Docker trick: a container that runs Nginx and uses it to route traffic to other containers based on the hostname—but the hostnames to be routed are configured using environment variables which the run-nginx.py CMD script uses to dynamically construct an nginx config when the container starts. # 21st February 2018, 5:04 am

Python & Async Simplified. Andrew Godwin: “Python’s async framework is actually relatively simple when you treat it at face value, but a lot of tutorials and documentation discuss it in minute implementation detail, so I wanted to make a higher-level overview that deliberately ignores some of the small facts and focuses on the practicalities of writing projects that mix both kinds of code.” ‪This is really useful: clearly explains the two separate worlds of Python (sync and async functions) and describes Andrew’s clever sync_to_async and async_to_sync decorators as well.‬ # 20th February 2018, 12:30 am

asgiref: AsyncToSync and SyncToAsync (via) Andrew’s classes in asgiref that can turn a synchronous callable into an awaitable (that runs in a thread pool) or an awaitable callable into a synchronous callable, using Python 3 futures and asyncio. # 2nd February 2018, 7:06 pm

Channels 2.0. Andrew just shipped Channels 2.0—a major rewrite and redesign of the Channels project he started back in 2014. Channels brings async to Django, providing a logical, standardized way of supporting things like WebSockets and asynchronous execution on top of a Django application. Previously it required you to run a separate Twisted server and redis/RabbitMQ queue, but thanks to Python 3 async everything can now be deployed as a single process. And the new ASGI spec means its turtles all the way down! Everything from URL routing to view functions to middleware can be composed together using the same ASGI interface. # 2nd February 2018, 6:19 pm

The First Few Weeks—ep.io. Another take on managed Python Django/WSGI hosting, from Andrew Godwin and Ben Firshman. # 13th January 2011, 4:25 am

On Django And Migrations. South author Andrew Godwin on the plans for migrations in Django. His excellent South migration library will be split in to two parts—one handling database abstraction, dependency resolution and history tracking and the other providing autodetection and the South user interface. The former will go in to Django proper, encouraging other migration libraries to share the same core abstractions. # 2nd June 2010, 4:27 pm

Announcing Heechee. “Heechee is a transparent mercurial-as-subversion gateway”—you can use it to allow subversion clients to check out a mercurial repository, meaning svn:externals can work against projects hosted by mercurial. It’s very young code but I’ve already seen it out-perform regular subversion for checkout speed. # 11th September 2009, 2:16 am

South’s Design. Andrew Godwin explains why South resorts to parsing your models.py file in order to construct information about for creating automatic migrations. # 13th May 2009, 12:30 pm

Southerly Breezes. Andrew Godwin is slowly assimilating the best ideas from other Django migration systems in to South—the latest additions include ORM Freezing from Migratory and automatic change detection. Exciting stuff. # 15th March 2009, 1:17 pm

South. A brand new light-weight Django migrations tool from Andrew Godwin. On first glance, this is spookily similar to the system we’ve been putting together at GCap. # 8th August 2008, 11:42 am

LastGraph 3. Andrew Godwin’s last.fm profile visualisation tool, now in its third incarnation. # 25th May 2008, 2:05 pm

Graphication. Andrew Godwin’s Python graphing library, based on Cairo. Responsible for the very handsome graphs on The Carbon Account. # 30th March 2008, 7:05 pm

LastGraph. Now Available. Andrew Godwin has relaunched his LastGraph Last.fm graphing application. The new version is built on Django and S3 and uses Andrew’s Graphication graphing library based on Cairo. # 15th October 2007, 10:02 pm