Items in Sep, 2019
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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).
[... 544 words]Microservices are about scaling teams, not scaling tech
— Petrus Theron # 28th September 2019, 4:23 pm
If you’re a little shy at conferences, speaking is The Best way to break the ice. Nobody talks to you before the talk. Everybody want’s to talk to you afterwards, largely because they have a way in. As such, public speaking is bizarrely good for introverts.
— Andy Budd # 26th September 2019, 3:15 pm
Looking back at the Snowden revelations (via) Six years on from the Snowden revelations, crypto researcher Matthew Green reviews their impact and reminds us what we learned. Really interesting. # 25th September 2019, 5:48 am
People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystem are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?
— Greta Thunberg # 23rd September 2019, 8:28 pm
The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (via) Research from 2016: “Across 33 rich countries, only 5% of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of people can complete medium-complexity tasks” # 23rd September 2019, 2:49 pm
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.
[... 870 words]Anyone with solid knowledge of both SQL and genetic engineering want to write me an UPDATE query to turn me into a dinosaur?
— @simonw # 19th September 2019, 4 pm
genome-to-sqlite. I just found out 23andMe let you export your genome as a zipped TSV file, so I wrote a little Python command-line tool to import it into a SQLite database. # 19th September 2019, 3:58 pm
Weeknotes: ONA19, twitter-to-sqlite, datasette-rure
I’ve decided to start writing weeknotes for the duration of my JSK fellowship. Here goes!
[... 919 words]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.
[... 876 words]Evolving “nofollow” – new ways to identify the nature of links (via) Slightly confusing announcement from Google: they’re introducing rel=ugc and rel=sponsored in addition to rel=nofollow, and will be treating all three values as “hints” for their indexing system. They’re very unclear as to what the concrete effects of these hints will be, presumably because they will become part of the secret sauce of their ranking algorithm. # 10th September 2019, 9:16 pm
sqlite-utils 1.11. Amjith Ramanujam contributed an excellent new feature to sqlite-utils, which I’ve now released as part of version 1.11. Previously you could enable SQLite full-text-search on a table using the .enable_fts() method (or the “sqlite-utils enable-fts” CLI command) but it wouldn’t reflect future changes to the table—you had to use populate_fts() any time you inserted new records. Thanks to Amjith you can now pass create_triggers=True (or --create-triggers) to cause sqlite-utils to automatically add triggers that keeps the FTS index up-to-date any time a row is inserted, updated or deleted from the table. # 3rd September 2019, 1:05 am