Simon Willison’s Weblog

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My approach to running a link blog

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I started running a basic link blog on this domain back in November 2003—publishing links (which I called “blogmarks”) with a title, URL, short snippet of commentary and a “via” link where appropriate.

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Weeknotes: Three podcasts, two trips and a new plugin system

I fell behind a bit on my weeknotes. Here’s most of what I’ve been doing in September.

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Themes from DjangoCon US 2024

Visit Themes from DjangoCon US 2024

I just arrived home from a trip to Durham, North Carolina for DjangoCon US 2024. I’ve already written about my talk where I announced a new plugin system for Django; here are my notes on some of the other themes that resonated with me during the conference.

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DJP: A plugin system for Django

Visit DJP: A plugin system for Django

DJP is a new plugin mechanism for Django, built on top of Pluggy. I announced the first version of DJP during my talk yesterday at DjangoCon US 2024, How to design and implement extensible software with plugins. I’ll post a full write-up of that talk once the video becomes available—this post describes DJP and how to use what I’ve built so far.

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django-http-debug, a new Django app mostly written by Claude

Visit django-http-debug, a new Django app mostly written by Claude

Yesterday I finally developed something I’ve been casually thinking about building for a long time: django-http-debug. It’s a reusable Django app—something you can pip install into any Django project—which provides tools for quickly setting up a URL that returns a canned HTTP response and logs the full details of any incoming request to a database table.

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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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Django SQL Dashboard 1.0

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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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Django SQL Dashboard

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I’ve released the first non-alpha version of Django SQL Dashboard, which provides an interface for running arbitrary read-only SQL queries directly against a PostgreSQL database, protected by the Django authentication scheme. It can also be used to create saved dashboards that can be published or shared internally.

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Adding GeoDjango to an existing Django project

Work on VIAL for Vaccinate The States continues.

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Weeknotes: Vaccinate The States, and how I learned that returning dozens of MB of JSON works just fine these days

Visit Weeknotes: Vaccinate The States, and how I learned that returning dozens of MB of JSON works just fine these days

On Friday VaccinateCA grew in scope, a lot: we launched a new website called Vaccinate The States. Patrick McKenzie wrote more about the project here—the short version is that we’re building the most comprehensive possible dataset of vaccine availability in the USA, using a combination of data collation, online research and continuing to make a huge number of phone calls.

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Porting VaccinateCA to Django

Visit Porting VaccinateCA to Django

As I mentioned back in February, I’ve been working with the VaccinateCA project to try to bring the pandemic to an end a little earlier by helping gather as accurate a model as possible of where the Covid vaccine is available in California and how people can get it.

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Weeknotes: django-sql-dashboard widgets

Visit Weeknotes: django-sql-dashboard widgets

A few small releases this week, for django-sql-dashboard, datasette-auth-passwords and datasette-publish-vercel.

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Weeknotes: tableau-to-sqlite, django-sql-dashboard

Visit Weeknotes: tableau-to-sqlite, django-sql-dashboard

This week I started a limited production run of my new backend for Vaccinate CA calling, built a tableau-to-sqlite import tool and started working on a subset of Datasette for PostgreSQL and Django called django-sql-dashboard.

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Drawing the rest of the owl

My ambitious goal for the day was to get the new Django/PostgreSQL preview into a state where we could start sending example API requests to it from the help.vaccinate app.

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Trying to end the pandemic a little earlier with VaccinateCA

Visit Trying to end the pandemic a little earlier with VaccinateCA

This week I got involved with the VaccinateCA effort. We are trying to end the pandemic a little earlier, by building the most accurate database possible of vaccination locations and availability in California.

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Django admin customization, JSON in our PostgreSQL

My progress slowed a bit today as I started digging into some things I’m less familiar with—but I’ve found some tricks that I think will help us out a lot.

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Importing data from Airtable into Django, plus a search engine for all our code

I made a bunch of progress on the Django backend prototype-that-soon-won’t-be-a-prototype today.

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Spinning up a new Django app to act as a backend for VaccinateCA

My goal by the end of this week is to have a working proof of concept for a Django + PostgreSQL app that can replace Airtable as the principle backend for the https://www.vaccinateca.com/ site. This proof of concept will allow us to make a go or no-go decision and figure out what else needs to be implemented before we can start using it to track calls.

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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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Logging to SQLite using ASGI middleware

I had some fun playing around with ASGI middleware and logging during our flight back to England for the holidays.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Implementing faceted search with Django and PostgreSQL

Visit Implementing faceted search with Django and PostgreSQL

I’ve added a faceted search engine to this blog, powered by PostgreSQL. It supports regular text search (proper search, not just SQL“like” queries), filter by tag, filter by date, filter by content type (entries vs blogmarks vs quotation) and any combination of the above. Some example searches:

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Running gunicorn behind nginx on Heroku for buffering and logging

Heroku’s default setup for Django uses the gunicorn application server. Each Heroku dyno can only run a limited number of gunicorn workers, which means a limited number of requests can be served in parallel (around 4 per dyno is a good rule of thumb).

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The denormalized query engine design pattern

Visit The denormalized query engine design pattern

I presented this talk at DjangoCon 2017 in Spokane, Washington. Below is the abstract, the slides and the YouTube video of the talk.

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Why is snapEDA.com slow? Is it because it uses Django?

No, it’s not slow because it uses Django.

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Are traditional web frameworks and languages like RubyOnRail, Spring Boot and PHP dying now when new fast reactive pure JavaScript frameworks and services like Meteor, Node, Angular 2.0 and Firebase are breaking ground?

No.

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Should I use Django forms or pure HTML in order to do not establish borders for the growth of my app?

Use Django forms. Django scales horizontally on the front-end, so if your site needs to handle large amounts of traffic you just need to run multiple front-end servers—your form handling code will scale up just fine.

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