Simon Willison’s Weblog

Wrap text at specified width. New Observable notebook. I built this with the help of Claude 3 Opus—it’s a text wrapping tool which lets you set the width and also lets you optionally add a four space indent.

The four space indent is handy for posting on forums such as Hacker News that treat a four space indent as a code block. # 28th March 2024, 3:36 am

GitHub Public repo history tool (via) I built this Observable Notebook to run queries against the GH Archive (via ClickHouse) to try to answer questions about repository history—in particular, were they ever made public as opposed to private in the past.

It works by combining together PublicEvent event (moments when a private repo was made public) with the most recent PushEvent event for each of a user’s repositories. # 20th March 2024, 9:56 pm

Coroutines and web components (via) I like using generators in Python but I rarely knowingly use them in JavaScript—I’m probably most exposed to them by Observable, which uses then extensively under the hood as a mostly hidden implementation detail.

Laurent Renard here shows some absolutely ingenious tricks with them as a way of building stateful Web Components. # 9th March 2024, 3:38 am

Observable Framework 1.1 (via) Less than three weeks after 1.0, the 1.1 release adds a whole lot of interesting new stuff. The signature feature is self-hosted npm imports: Framework 1.0 linked out to CDN hosted copies of libraries, but 1.1 fetches copies locally and then bundles that code with the deployed static site.

This works by using the acorn JavaScript parsing library to statically analyze the code and find all of the relevant imports. # 5th March 2024, 9:12 pm

Observable notebook: URL to download a GitHub repository as a zip file (via) GitHub broke the “right click -> copy URL” feature on their Download ZIP button a few weeks ago. I’m still hoping they fix that, but in the meantime I built this Observable Notebook to generate ZIP URLs for any GitHub repo and any branch or commit hash.

Update 30th January 2024: GitHub have fixed the bug now, so right click -> Copy URL works again on that button. # 29th January 2024, 9:17 pm

Marimo (via) This is a really interesting new twist on Python notebooks.

The most powerful feature is that these notebooks are reactive: if you change the value or code in a cell (or change the value in an input widget) every other cell that depends on that value will update automatically. It’s the same pattern implemented by Observable JavaScript notebooks, but now it works for Python.

There are a bunch of other nice touches too. The notebook file format is a regular Python file, and those files can be run as “applications” in addition to being edited in the notebook interface. The interface is very nicely built, especially for such a young project—they even have GitHub Copilot integration for their CodeMirror cell editors. # 12th January 2024, 9:17 pm