Items in Apr, 2020
Filters: Year: 2020 × Month: Apr × Sorted by date
Weeknotes: Archiving coronavirus.data.gov.uk, custom pages and directory configuration in Datasette, photos-to-sqlite
I mainly made progress on three projects this week: Datasette, photos-to-sqlite and a cleaner way of archiving data to a git repository.
[... 1132 words]If microservices are implemented incorrectly or used as a band-aid without addressing some of the root flaws in your system, you’ll be unable to do new product development because you’re drowning in the complexity.
— Alexandra Noonan # 29th April 2020, 5:56 pm
The biggest thing people don’t appreciate about large companies is the basic productive unit isn’t an individual it is an engineering team with about ~8 members.
— Patrick McKenzie # 29th April 2020, 6:39 am
Bill Gates’s vision for life beyond the coronavirus. Fascinating interview with Bill Gates—the most interesting and informative article I’ve read about Covid-19 in quite a while. # 28th April 2020, 1:01 am
Spotify introduced the vocabulary of missions, tribes, squads, guilds, and chapter leads for describing its way of working. It gave the illusion it had created something worthy of needing to learn unusual word choices. However, if we remove the unnecessary synonyms from the ideas, the Spotify model is revealed as a collection of cross-functional teams with too much autonomy and a poor management structure.
— Jeremiah Lee # 24th April 2020, 9:57 pm
Restricting SSH connections to devices within a Tailscale network. TIL how to run SSH on a VPS instance (in this case Amazon Lightsail) such that it can only be SSHd to by devices connected to a private Tailscale VPN. # 23rd April 2020, 6:28 pm
Weeknotes: Datasette 0.40, various projects, Dogsheep photos
A new release of Datasette, two new projects and progress towards a Dogsheep photos solution.
[... 826 words]98.css (via) This is pretty beautiful: a CSS library that meticulously styles HTML form elements to look like the Windows 98 interface. # 22nd April 2020, 4:22 am
Estimating COVID-19’s Rt in Real-Time. I’m not qualified to comment on the mathematical approach, but this is a really nice example of a Jupyter Notebook explanatory essay by Kevin Systrom. # 20th April 2020, 3:06 pm
Using a self-rewriting README powered by GitHub Actions to track TILs
I’ve started tracking TILs—Today I Learneds—inspired by this five-year-and-counting collection by Josh Branchaud on GitHub (found via Hacker News). I’m keeping mine in GitHub too, and using GitHub Actions to automatically generate an index page README in the repository and a SQLite-backed search engine.
[... 1100 words]How Super Graph compiles GraphQL to a single SQL query. Super Graph is a GraphQL server that compiles arbitrarily nested GraphQL queries to “a single fast SQL query”. I’ve always wondered how that could possible work, so I asked author Vikram Rangnekar for an example of a compiled query—it turns out it uses a brilliant sequence of JSON aggregations to glue together results from nested subqueries and left outer joins. # 16th April 2020, 10:52 pm
SQL is a better API language than GraphQL – Convince me otherwise (via) A dumb tweet I posted this morning blew up today and ended up on the Hacker News homepage. # 16th April 2020, 10:44 pm
Weeknotes: Hacking on 23 different projects
I wrote a lot of code this week: 184 commits over 23 repositories! I’ve also started falling for Zeit Now v2, having found workarounds for some of my biggest problems with it.
[... 901 words]Goodbye Zeit Now v1, hello datasette-publish-now—and talking to myself in GitHub issues
This week I’ve been mostly dealing with the finally announced shutdown of Zeit Now v1. And having long-winded conversations with myself in GitHub issues.
[... 2050 words]New developer features in Firefox 75 (via) Firefox 75 just came out with a bunch of new developer features. My favourite is instant evaluation in the JavaScript console: any statement without side effects now shows a preview of its results as you type. # 7th April 2020, 7:23 pm
Zeit Now v1 to sunset soon: no new deployments from 1st May, total shutdown 7th August. I posted a thread on Twitter with some thoughts. Zeit Now v1 remains the best hosting platform I’ve ever used given my particular tastes. They’ve handled the shutdown very responsibly, but I’m sad to see it go. # 4th April 2020, 5:32 am
Django Release Cycle (via) Really nice visual representation of Django’s release cycle, built by Jeff Triplett as a remix of the Python release cycle by Dustin Ingram. # 3rd April 2020, 4:56 pm
Several grumpy opinions about remote work at Tailscale. Really useful in-depth reviews of the tools Tailscale are using to build their remote company. “We decided early on—about the time we realized all three cofounders live in different cities—that we were going to go all-in on remote work, at least for engineering, which for now is almost all our work. As several people have pointed out before, fully remote is generally more stable than partly remote.” # 2nd April 2020, 2:48 pm
Weeknotes: Covid-19, First Python Notebook, more Dogsheep, Tailscale
My covid-19.datasettes.com project publishes information on COVID-19 cases around the world. The project started out using data from Johns Hopkins CSSE, but last week the New York Times started publishing high quality USA county- and state-level daily numbers to their own repository. Here’s the change that added the NY Times data.
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