Items in 2020
Filters: Year: 2020 × Sorted by date
You know Google Maps? What I do is, like, build little pieces of Google Maps over and over for people who need them but can’t just use Google Maps because they’re not allowed to for some reason, or another.
— Joe Morrison # 29th December 2020, 8:32 pm
Replicating SQLite with rqlite (via) I’ve been trying out rqlite, a “lightweight, distributed relational database, which uses SQLite as its storage engine”. It’s written in Go and uses the Raft consensus algorithm to allow a cluster of nodes to elect a leader and replicate SQLite statements between them. By default it uses in-memory SQLite databases with an on-disk Raft replication log—here are my notes on running it in “on disk” mode as a way to run multiple Datasette processes against replicated SQLite database files. # 28th December 2020, 7:51 pm
While copywriting is used to persuade a user to take a certain action, technical writing exists to support the user and remove barriers to getting something done. Good technical writing is hard because writers must get straight to the point without losing or confusing readers.
— Stephanie Morillo # 28th December 2020, 3:58 pm
Weeknotes: Datasette internals
I’ve been working on some fundamental changes to Datasette’s internal workings—they’re not quite ready for a release yet, but they’re shaping up in an interesting direction.
[... 760 words]Datasette Weekly: Official project website for Datasette, building a search engine with Dogsheep Beta, sqlite-utils analyze-tables (via) Volume 5 of the Datasette Weekly-ish newsletter. # 23rd December 2020, 11:52 pm
Building a search engine for datasette.io
This week I added a search engine to datasette.io, using the search indexing tool I’ve been building for Dogsheep.
[... 1391 words]How Shopify Uses WebAssembly Outside of the Browser (via) I’m fascinated by applications of WebAssembly outside the browser. As a Python programmer I’m excited to see native code libraries getting compiled to WASM in a way that lets me call them from Python code via a bridge, but the other interesting application is executing untrusted code in a sandbox.
Shopify are doing exactly that—they are building a kind-of plugin mechanism where partner code compiled to WASM runs inside their architecture using Fastly’s Lucet. The performance numbers are in the same ballpark as native code.
Also interesting: they’re recommending AssemblyScript, a TypeScript-style language designed to compile directly to WASM without needing any additional interpreter support, as required by dynamic languages such as JavaScript, Python or Ruby. # 19th December 2020, 4:46 pm
Commits are snapshots, not diffs (via) Useful, clearly explained revision of some Git fundamentals. # 17th December 2020, 10:01 pm
At GitHub, we want to protect developer privacy, and we find cookie banners quite irritating, so we decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really. 🤔
So, we have removed all non-essential cookies from GitHub, and visiting our website does not send any information to third-party analytics services.
— Nat Friedman # 17th December 2020, 7:44 pm
I get asked a lot about learning to code. Sure, if you can. It’s fun. But the real action, the crux of things, is there in the database. Grab a tiny, free database like SQLite. Import a few million rows of data. Make them searchable. It’s one of the most soothing activities known to humankind, taking big piles of messy data and massaging them into the rigid structure required of a relational database. It’s true power.
— Paul Ford # 16th December 2020, 5:35 am
Build v.s. buy: how billing models affect your internal culture
Something to pay attention to when making a build v.s. buy decision is the impact that billing models will have on your usage of a tool.
[... 410 words]datasette.io, an official project website for Datasette
This week I launched datasette.io—the new official project website for Datasette.
[... 1971 words]If you are pre-product market fit it’s probably too early to think about event based analytics. If you have a small number of users and are able to talk with all of them, you will get much more meaningful data getting to know them than if you were to set up product analytics. You probably don’t have enough users to get meaningful data from product analytics anyways.
— Michael Malis # 11th December 2020, 6:39 am
datasette.io (via) Datasette finally has an official project website, three years after the first release of the software. I built it using Datasette, with custom templates to define the various pages. The site includes news, latest releases, example sites and a new searchable plugin directory. # 11th December 2020, 4:11 am
Deno 1.6 Release Notes. Two signature features in Deno 1.6 worth paying attention to: a built-in language server for code editors like VS Code, and the “deno compile” command which can build Deno JavaScript/TypeScript projects into standalone binaries. The ability to build binaries has turned out to be a killer feature of both Go and Rust, so seeing it ship as a default capability of a interpreted dynamic language is fascinating. I would love it if Python followed Deno’s example. # 10th December 2020, 1:25 am
The case against client certificates (via) Colm MacCárthaigh provides a passionately argued Twitter thread about client certificates and why they should be avoided. I tried using them as an extra layer of protection fir my personal Dogsheep server and ended up abandoning them—certificate management across my devices was too fiddly. # 9th December 2020, 2:41 pm
Cameras and Lenses (via) Fabulous explotable interactive essay by Bartosz Ciechanowski explaining how cameras and lenses work. # 8th December 2020, 3:38 am
Weeknotes: github-to-sqlite workflows, datasette-ripgrep enhancements, Datasette 0.52
This week: Improvements to datasette-ripgrep, github-to-sqlite and datasette-graphql, plus Datasette 0.52 and a flurry of dot-releases.
The secrets of Monkey Island’s source code (via) To celebrate the thirty year anniversary of the Secret of Monkey Island the Video Game History Foundation interviewed developer Rod Gilbert and produced this comprehensive collection of cut content and material showing how the game was originally constructed. # 5th December 2020, 4:32 pm
Discoverable CLIs have comprehensive help texts, provide lots of examples, suggest what command to run next, suggest what to do when there is an error. There are lots of ideas that can be stolen from GUIs to make CLIs easier to learn and use, even for power users.
— Command Line Interface Guidelines # 4th December 2020, 8:48 pm
Command Line Interface Guidelines (via) Aanand Prasad, Ben Firshman, Carl Tashian and Eva Parish provide the missing manual for designing CLI tools in 2020. Deeply researched and clearly presented—I picked up a bunch of useful tips and ideas from reading this, and I’m looking forward to applying them to my own CLI projects. # 4th December 2020, 8:44 pm
The value of a product is the number of problems it can solve divided by the amount of complexity the user needs to keep in their head to use it. Consider an iPhone vs a standard TV remote: an iPhone touchscreen can be used for countless different functions, but there’s very little to remember about how it works (tap, drag, swipe, pinch). With a TV remote you have to remember what every button does; the more things you can use the remote for, the more buttons it has. We want to create iPhones, not TV remotes.
— Adam Wiggins: Heroku Values # 3rd December 2020, 9:25 pm
Scaling Datastores at Slack with Vitess (via) Slack spent three years migrating 99% of their MySQL query load to run against Vitess, the open source MySQL sharding system originally built by YouTube. “Today, we serve 2.3 million QPS at peak. 2M of those queries are reads and 300K are writes. Our median query latency is 2 ms, and our p99 query latency is 11 ms.” # 1st December 2020, 9:30 pm
New for AWS Lambda – Container Image Support. “You can now package and deploy Lambda functions as container images of up to 10 GB in size”—can’t wait to try this out with Datasette. # 1st December 2020, 5:34 pm
Why is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast? (via) This explanation by Erik Engheim is exactly the right level of nerdery for me. # 30th November 2020, 11:20 pm
Datasette Weekly volume 4. Datasette Office Hours, Personal Data Warehouses, datasette-ripgrep, datasette-indieauth, Datasette Client for Observable and more. # 30th November 2020, 11:02 pm
Datasette Office Hours (via) I’ve decided to try running Datasette Office Hours every Friday. If you’d like to chat with me over Zoom about the project for 20 minutes for any reason at all you can grab a slot here using Calendly. # 30th November 2020, 11:01 pm
Datasette 0.52. A relatively small release—it has a new plugin hook (database_actions(), for adding links to a new database actions menu), renames the --config option to --setting and adds a new “datasette publish cloudrun --apt-get-install” option. # 29th November 2020, 12:56 am
datasette-ripgrep: deploy a regular expression search engine for your source code
This week I built datasette-ripgrep—a web application for running regular expression searches against source code, built on top of the amazing ripgrep command-line tool.
[... 1362 words]Unravelling `not` in Python (via) Part of a series where Brett Cannon looks at how fundamental Python syntactic sugar works, including a clearly explained dive into the underlying op codes and C implementation. # 27th November 2020, 5:59 pm