Simon Willison’s Weblog

sqlite-utils 2.0: real upserts

I just released version 2.0 of my sqlite-utils library/CLI tool to PyPI.

Weeknotes: Datasette 0.33

I released Datasette 0.33 yesterday. The release represents an accumulation of small changes and features since Datasette 0.32 back in November. Duplicating the release notes:

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.

Better presentations through storytelling and STAR moments

Last week I completed GSBGEN 315: Strategic Communication at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

datasette-atom: Define an Atom feed using a custom SQL query

I’ve been having a ton of fun iterating on www.niche-museums.com. I put together some notes on how the site works last week, and I’ve been taking advantage of the Thanksgiving break to continue exploring ways in which Datasette can be used to quickly build database-backed static websites.

niche-museums.com, powered by Datasette

I just released a major upgrade to my www.niche-museums.com website (launched last month).

Weeknotes: datasette-template-sql

Last week I talked about wanting to take ona a larger Datasette project, and listed some candidates. I ended up pushing a big project that I hadn’t listed there: the upgrade of Datasette to Python 3.8, which meant dropping support for Python 3.5 (thanks to incompatible dependencies).

Weeknotes: Python 3.7 on Glitch, datasette-render-markdown

Streaks is really working well for me. I’m at 12 days of commits to Datasette, 16 posting a daily Niche Museum, 19 of actually reviewing my email inbox and 14 of guitar practice. I rewarded myself for that last one by purchasing an actual classical (as opposed to acoustic) guitar.

Weeknotes: More releases, more museums

Lots of small releases this week.

Weeknotes: Niche Museums, Kepler, Trees and Streaks

Every now and then someone will ask “so when are you going to build Museums Near Me then?”, based on my obsession with niche museums and websites like www.owlsnearme.com.

Weeknotes: The Squirrel Census, Genome SQL query

This week was mostly about incremental improvements. And squirrels.

Weeknotes: PG&E outages, and Open Source works!

My big focus this week was the PG&E outages project. I’m really pleased with how this turned out: the San Francisco Chronicle used data from it for their excellent PG&E outage interactive (mixing in data on wind conditions) and it earned a bunch of interest on Twitter and some discussion on Hacker News.

Tracking PG&E outages by scraping to a git repo

PG&E have cut off power to several million people in northern California, supposedly as a precaution against wildfires.

Weeknotes: Dogsheep

Having figured out my Stanford schedule, this week I started getting back into the habit of writing some code.

Weeknotes: first week of Stanford classes

One of the benefits of the JSK fellowship is that I can take classes and lectures at Stanford, on a somewhat ad-hoc basis (I don’t take exams or earn credits).

Weeknotes: Design thinking for journalists, genome-to-sqlite, datasette-atom

I haven’t had much time for code this week: we’ve had a full five day workshop at JSK with Tran Ha (a JSK alumni) learning how to apply Design Thinking to our fellowship projects and generally to challenges facing journalism.

Weeknotes: ONA19, twitter-to-sqlite, datasette-rure

I’ve decided to start writing weeknotes for the duration of my JSK fellowship. Here goes!

My JSK Fellowship: Building an open source ecosystem of tools for data journalism

I started a new chapter of my career last week: I began a year long fellowship with the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships program at Stanford.

Single sign-on against GitHub using ASGI middleware

I released Datasette 0.29 last weekend, the first version of Datasette to be built on top of ASGI (discussed previously in Porting Datasette to ASGI, and Turtles all the way down).

Porting Datasette to ASGI, and Turtles all the way down

This evening I finally closed a Datasette issue that I opened more than 13 months ago: #272: Port Datasette to ASGI. A few notes on why this is such an important step for the project.

Datasette 0.28—and why master should always be releasable

It’s been quite a while since the last substantial release of Datasette. Datasette 0.27 came out all the way back in January.

Running Datasette on Glitch

The worst part of any software project is setting up a development environment. It’s by far the biggest barrier for anyone trying to get started learning to code. I’ve been a developer for more than twenty years and I still feel the pain any time I want to do something new.

Generating a commit log for San Francisco’s official list of trees

San Francisco has a neat open data portal (as do an increasingly large number of cities these days). For a few years my favourite file on there has been Street Tree List, a list of all 190,000 trees in the city maintained by the Department of Public Works.

I commissioned an oil painting of Barbra Streisand’s cloned dogs

sqlite-utils: a Python library and CLI tool for building SQLite databases

sqlite-utils is a combination Python library and command-line tool I’ve been building over the past six months which aims to make creating new SQLite databases as quick and easy as possible.

Exploring search relevance algorithms with SQLite

SQLite isn’t just a fast, high quality embedded database: it also incorporates a powerful full-text search engine in the form of the FTS4 and FTS5 extensions. You’ve probably used these a bunch of times already: many iOS, Android and desktop applications use SQLite under-the-hood and use it to implement their built-in search.