Items in 2018
Filters: Year: 2018 × Sorted by date
The Friendship That Made Google Huge. The New Yorker profiles Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Google’s first and only level 11 Senior Fellows. This is some of the best writing on complex software engineering topics (map-reduce, Tensor Flow and the like) aimed at a general audience that I’ve ever seen. Also a very compelling case study in pair programming. # 31st December 2018, 3:56 am
benfred/py-spy (via) A Python port of Julia Evans’ rbspy profiler, which she describes as “probably better” than the original. I just tried it out and it’s really impressive: it’s written in Rust but has precompiled binaries so you can just run “pip install py-spy” to install it. Shows live output in the terminal while your program is running and also includes the option to generate neat SVG flame graphs. # 29th December 2018, 5:18 am
Without deep understanding of the basic tools needed to build and train new algorithms, he says, researchers creating AIs resort to hearsay, like medieval alchemists. “People gravitate around cargo-cult practices,” relying on “folklore and magic spells,” adds François Chollet, a computer scientist at Google in Mountain View, California.
— Matthew Hutson # 26th December 2018, 4:53 pm
If you wrap your main content – that is, the stuff that isn’t navigation, logo and main header etc – in a <main> tag, a screen reader user can jump immediately to it using a keyboard shortcut. Imagine how useful that is – they don’t have to listen to all the content before it, or tab through it to get to the main meat of your page.
— Bruce Lawson # 19th December 2018, 1:07 pm
Fast Autocomplete Search for Your Website
Every website deserves a great search engine—but building a search engine can be a lot of work, and hosting it can quickly get expensive.
[... 4159 words]Fast Autocomplete Search for Your Website (via) I wrote a tutorial for the 24 ways advent calendar on building fast autocomplete search for a website on top of Datasette and SQLite. I built the demo against 24 ways itself—I used wget to recursively fetch all 330 articles as HTML, then wrote code in a Jupyter notebook to extract the raw data from them (with BeautifulSoup) and load them into SQLite using my sqlite-utils Python library. I deployed the resulting database using Datasette, then wrote some vanilla JavaScript to implement autocomplete using fast SQL queries against the Datasette JSON API. # 19th December 2018, 12:26 am
Develop Your Naturalist Superpowers with Observable Notebooks and iNaturalist (via) Natalie’s article for this year’s 24 ways advent calendar shows how you can use Observable notebooks to quickly build interactive visualizations against web APIs. She uses the iNaturalist API to show species of Nudibranchs that you might see in a given month, plus a Vega-powered graph of sightings over the course of the year. This really inspired me to think harder about how I can use Observable to solve some of my API debugging needs, and I’ve already spun up a couple of private Notebooks to exercise new APIs that I’m building at work. It’s a huge productivity boost. # 18th December 2018, 10:39 pm
PEP 8016 -- The Steering Council Model (via) The votes are in and Python has a new governance model, partly inspired by the model used by the Django Software Foundation. A core elected council of five people (with a maximum of two employees from any individual company) will oversee the project. # 17th December 2018, 4:02 pm
Pampy: Pattern Matching for Python (via) Ingenious implementation of Erlang/Rust style pattern matching in just 150 lines of extremely cleanly designed and well-tested Python. # 17th December 2018, 7:14 am
for those open source companies that still harbor magical beliefs, let me put this to you as directly as possible: cloud services providers are emphatically not going to license your proprietary software. I mean, you knew that, right? The whole premise with your proprietary license is that you are finding that there is no way to compete with the operational dominance of the cloud services providers; did you really believe that those same dominant cloud services providers can’t simply reimplement your LDAP integration or whatever? The cloud services providers are currently reproprietarizing all of computing — they are making their own CPUs for crying out loud! — reimplementing the bits of your software that they need in the name of the service that their customers want (and will pay for!) won’t even move the needle in terms of their effort.
— Bryan Cantrill # 15th December 2018, 5:02 pm
nip.io. "NIP.IO maps <anything>.<IP Address>.nip.io to the corresponding <IP Address>, even 127.0.0.1.nip.io maps to 127.0.0.1" - looks useful. xip.io is a different service that does the same thing. Being able to put anything at the start looks handy for testing systems that handle different subdomains. # 12th December 2018, 6:18 pm
The _repr_html_ method in Jupyter notebooks (via) Today I learned that if you add a _repr_html_ method returning a string of HTML to any Python class Jupyter notebooks will render that HTML inline to represent that object. # 12th December 2018, 6:09 pm
Things About Real-World Data Science Not Discussed In MOOCs and Thought Pieces (via) Really good article, pointing out that carefully optimizing machine learning models is only a small part of the day-to-day work of a data scientist: cleaning up data, building dashboards, shipping models to production, deciding on trade-offs between performance and production and considering the product design and ethical implementations of what you are doing make up a much larger portion of the job. # 11th December 2018, 8:51 pm
npm users have downloaded more than 489 billion packages in the 9 year life of the project, with the strange effect of exponential growth being that 286 billion, or 58% of those, were just in the last year.
— Laurie Voss # 4th December 2018, 2:02 am
How Does React Tell a Class from a Function? (via) Understanding the answer requires a deep understanding of the history of the JavaScript class system plus how Babel and other tools work with it. “For an API to be simple to use, you often need to consider the language semantics (possibly, for several languages, including future directions), runtime performance, ergonomics with and without compile-time steps, the state of the ecosystem and packaging solutions, early warnings, and many other things. The end result might not always be the most elegant, but it must be practical.” # 3rd December 2018, 1:30 am
The nature of NPM is such that I’d expect most large corporate Node software to depend on at least a couple of single individuals’ hobby projects. The problem is that those projects don’t tend to fulfill the same expectations of security, quality and maintenance.
— Sébastien Cevey # 2nd December 2018, 9:32 pm
Software Sprawl, The Golden Path, and Scaling Teams With Agency (via) This is smart: the “golden path” approach to encouraging a standard stack within a large engineering organization. If you build using the components on the golden path you get guaranteed ongoing support and as much free monitoring/tooling as can possibly be provided. I also really like the suggestion that this should be managed by a “council” of senior engineers with one member of the council rotated out every quarter to keep things from getting stale and cabal-like. # 2nd December 2018, 7:40 pm
repo2docker (via) Neat tool from the Jupyter project team: run “jupyter-repo2docker https://github.com/norvig/pytudes” and it will pull a GitHub repository, create a new Docker container for it, install Jupyter and launch a Jupyter instance for you to start trying out the library. I’ve been doing this by hand using virtual environments, but using Docker for even cleaner isolation seems like a smart improvement. # 28th November 2018, 10:06 pm
BigInt: arbitrary-precision integers in JavaScript (via) The BigInt specification is now supported in Chrome—but it hasn’t yet made it to other browsers. The Chrome team have a really interesting solution: they’ve released a JSBI library which you can use to do BigInt calculations in any browser today, and an accompanying Babel plugin which can rewrite calls to that library into BigInt syntax once browser support catches up. I’ve never seen a library that includes a tool for refactoring itself into oblivion before. # 28th November 2018, 2:22 am
AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites. OK this is cool. “Instead of building your own ground station or entering in to a long-term contract, you can make use of AWS Ground Station on an as-needed, pay-as-you-go basis. [...] You don’t need to build or maintain antennas, and can focus on your work or research. We’re starting out with a pair of ground stations today, and will have 12 in operation by mid-2019. Each ground station is associated with a particular AWS Region; the raw analog data from the satellite is processed by our modem digitizer into a data stream (in what is formally known as VITA 49 baseband or VITA 49 RF over IP data streams) and routed to an EC2 instance that is responsible for doing the signal processing to turn it into a byte stream.” # 28th November 2018, 1:04 am
Whether you like it or not, whether you approve it or not, people outside of your design team are making significant design choices that affect your customers in important ways. They are designing your product. They are designers.
— Daniel Burka # 25th November 2018, 7:03 pm
React is “value UI”. Its core principle is that UI is a value, just like a string or an array. You can keep it in a variable, pass it around, use JavaScript control flow with it, and so on. That expressiveness is the point — not some diffing to avoid applying changes to the DOM.
— Dan Abramov # 24th November 2018, 5:58 pm
Helicopter accident analysis notebook (via) Ben Welsh worked on an article for the LA Times about helicopter accident rates, and has published the underlying analysis as an extremely detailed Jupyter notebook. Lots of neat new (to me) notebook tricks in here as well. # 19th November 2018, 6:25 pm
dive (via) Handy command-line tool (as with so much of the Docker ecosystem it’s written in Go, which means you can download a Darwin binary directly from the GitHub releases page and run it directly on your Mac) for visually exploring the different layers of a given Docker image. # 19th November 2018, 4:41 am
Building smaller Python Docker images
Changes are afoot at Zeit Now, my preferred hosting provider for the past year (see previous posts). They have announced Now 2.0, an intriguing new approach to providing auto-scaling immutable deployments. It’s built on top of lambdas, and comes with a whole host of new constraints: code needs to fit into a 5MB bundle for example (though it looks like this restriction will soon be relaxed a little—update November 19th you can now bump this up to 50MB).
[... 1872 words]Squoosh. This is by far the most useful example of web assembly I’ve seen so far: Squoosh is a progressive web app for image optimization (JPEG, PNG, GIF, SVG and more) which uses emscripten-compiled versions of best in breed image codec implementations to provide a browser interface for applying and previewing those optimizations. # 12th November 2018, 11:15 pm
The premise of “The Good Place” is absurdly high concept. It sounds less like the basis of a prime-time sitcom than an experimental puppet show conducted, without a permit, on the woodsy edge of a large public park.
— Sam Anderson # 10th November 2018, 9:48 pm
Application-Layer DDoS Attack Protection with HAProxy (via) Thorough. # 9th November 2018, 6:29 pm
Tracking Jupyter: Newsletter, the Third... (via) Tony Hirst’s tracking Jupyter newsletter is fantastic. The Jupyter ecosystem is incredibly exciting and fast moving at the moment as more and more groups discover how productive it is, and Tony’s newsletter is a wealth of information on what’s going on out there. # 9th November 2018, 5:42 pm
A Netflix Web Performance Case Study (via) Fascinating description of how Netflix knocked the 3G loading times of their homepage in half for logged-out users by rendering the React templates on the server-side and using the bare amount of vanilla JavaScript necessary to get the homepage interactive—then XHR prefetching the full React code needed to power the subsequent signup flow. Via Alex Russell, who tweets “I’m increasingly optimistic that we can cap JS emissions by quarantining legacy frameworks to the server side.” # 6th November 2018, 8:54 pm