Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Entries in 2020

Filters: Type: entry × Year: 2020 × Sorted by date


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.

[... 1073 words]

5:25 am / 19th February 2020 / gis, projects, shapefiles, spatialite, sqlite, geojson, weeknotes, tommacwright

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.

[... 933 words]

6:56 am / 11th February 2020 / projects, python, testing, unittests, datasette, pytest, weeknotes, datasettecloud, black

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.

[... 392 words]

7:34 am / 5th February 2020 / projects, geojson, datasette, weeknotes, datasettecloud

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.

[... 701 words]

5:58 am / 29th January 2020 / cookies, django, projects, sentry, datasette, weeknotes, datasettecloud, httpx

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.

[... 1431 words]

8:56 pm / 21st January 2020 / csv, deployment, museums, projects, zerodowntime, docker, datasette, weeknotes, traefik, datasettecloud, digitalocean

Tracking FARA by deploying a data API using GitHub Actions and Cloud Run

I’m using the combination of GitHub Actions and Google Cloud Run to retrieve data from the U.S. Department of Justice FARA website and deploy it as a queryable API using Datasette.

[... 1599 words]

7:51 am / 21st January 2020 / continuousdeployment, continuousintegration, datajournalism, github, projects, datasette, cloudrun, githubactions, gitscraping

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.

[... 806 words]

12:22 am / 14th January 2020 / stanford, docker, jsk, weeknotes, datasettecloud, digitalocean

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.

[... 1078 words]

11:02 pm / 6th January 2020 / museums, plugins, projects, seo, datasette, weeknotes

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