Items in Sep, 2021
Filters: Year: 2021 × Month: Sep × Sorted by date
The GIL and its effects on Python multithreading (via) Victor Skvortsov presents the most in-depth explanation of the Python Global Interpreter Lock I’ve seen anywhere. I learned a ton from reading this. # 29th September 2021, 5:23 pm
Weeknotes: CDC vaccination history fixes, developing in GitHub Codespaces
I spent the last week mostly surrounded by boxes: we’re completing our move to the new place and life is mostly unpacking now. I did find some time to fix some issues with my CDC vaccination history Datasette instance though.
[... 514 words]django-upgrade (via) Adam Johnson’s new CLI tool for upgrading Django projects by automatically applying changes to counter deprecations made in different versions of the framework. Uses the Python standard library tokenize module which gives it really quick performance in parsing and rewriting Python code. Exciting to see this kind of codemod approach becoming more common in Python world—JavaScript developers use this kind of thing a lot. # 26th September 2021, 5:42 am
New tool: an nginx playground. Julia Evans built a sandbox tool for interactively trying out an nginx configuration and executing test requests through it. I love this kind of tool, and Julia’s explanation of how they built it using a tiny fly.io instance and a network namespace to reduce the amount of damage any malicious usage could cause is really interesting. # 24th September 2021, 6:44 pm
File not found: A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans (via) This is fascinating: as-of 2017 university instructors have been increasingly encountering students who have absolutely no idea how files and folders on a computer work. The new generation has a completely different mental model of how applications work, where everything is found using search and data mostly lives inside the application that you use to manipulate it. # 23rd September 2021, 10:49 pm
Introducing Partytown 🎉: Run Third-Party Scripts From a Web Worker (via) This is just spectacularly clever. Partytown is a 6KB JavaScript library that helps you move gnarly poorly performing third-party scripts out of your main page and into a web worker, so they won’t destroy your page performance. The really clever bit is in how it provides sandboxed access to the page DOM: it uses a devious trick where a proxy object provides getters and setters which then make blocking API calls to a separate service worker, using the mostly-forgotten xhr.open(..., false) parameter that turns off the async default for an XMLHttpRequest call. # 23rd September 2021, 6:29 pm
egghead screencasting technical guide (via) Detailed guide to producing high quality screencasts—software to use, audio tips, editing workflow—from the egghead.io online instructor platform. # 20th September 2021, 5:39 pm
Weeknotes number 100
This entry marks my 100th weeknotes, which I’ve managed to post once a week (plus or minus a few days) consistently since 13th September 2019.
[... 593 words]Datasette Desktop 0.2.0: The annotated release notes
Datasette Desktop is a new macOS desktop application version of Datasette, an “open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data” built on top of SQLite. I released the first version last week—I’ve just released version 0.2.0 (and a 0.2.1 bug fix) with a whole bunch of critical improvements.
[... 2208 words]Imagine writing the investment memo for “20% of a picture of a dog” and being like “the most we should pay is probably about $2 million because the whole picture of the dog sold for $4 million three months ago and it can’t realistically have appreciated more than 150% since then; even if the whole picture of the dog is worth, aggressively, $10 million, this share would be worth $2 milllion.” What nonsense that is!
— Matt Levine # 10th September 2021, 7:27 am
Datasette Desktop—a macOS desktop application for Datasette
I just released version 0.1.0 of the new Datasette macOS desktop application, the first version that end-users can easily install. I would very much appreciate your help testing it out!
[... 1761 words]Datasette Desktop 0.1.0 (via) This is the first installable version of the new Datasette Desktop macOS application I’ve been building. Please try it out and leave feedback on Twitter or on the GitHub Discussions thread linked from the release notes. # 8th September 2021, 5:14 am
We never shipped a great commercial product. The reason for that is we didn’t focus. We tried to do a little bit of everything. It’s hard enough to maintain the growth of your developer community and build one great commercial product, let alone three or four, and it is impossible to do both, but that’s what we tried to do and we spent an enormous amount of money doing it.
— Solomon Hykes # 7th September 2021, 2:47 pm
Making world-class docs takes effort (via) Curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg writes about his principles for good documentation. I agree with all of these: he emphasizes keeping docs in the repo, avoiding the temptation to exclusively generate them from code, featuring examples and ensuring every API you provide has documentation. Daniel describes an approach similar to the documentation unit tests I’ve been using for my own projects: he has scripts which scan the curl documentation to ensure not only that everything is documented but that each documentation area contains the same sections in the same order. # 6th September 2021, 6:58 pm
Per-project PostgreSQL (via) Jamey Sharp describes an ingenious way of setting up PostgreSQL instances for each of your local development project, without depending on an always-running shared localhost database server. The trick is a shell script which creates a PGDATA folder in the current folder and then instantiates a PostgreSQL server in --single single user mode which listens on a Unix domain socket in that folder, instead of listening on the network. Jamey then uses direnv to automatically configure that PostgreSQL, initializing the DB if necessary, for each of his project folders. # 3rd September 2021, 3:06 am