9 items tagged “ben-welsh”
2024
Open source is really part of my process of getting unstuck, learning and contributing back to the community, and also helping future me have an easier time. ‘Me’ is probably the number one beneficiary of my open-source software work. To be honest with you, a lot of it is selfish. It's really about making me more productive, happier, and less stressed. For people who wonder why we should do open source, I think that they should consider that they themselves may benefit more than they realize.
2022
storysniffer (via) Ben Welsh built a small Python library that guesses if a URL points to an article on a news website, or if it’s more likely to be a category page or /about page or similar. I really like this as an example of what you can do with a tiny machine learning model: the model is bundled as a ~3MB pickle file as part of the package, and the repository includes the Jupyter notebook that was used to train it.
How to push tagged Docker releases to Google Artifact Registry with a GitHub Action. Ben Welsh’s writeup includes detailed step-by-step instructions for getting the mysterious “Workload Identity Federation” mechanism to work with GitHub Actions and Google Cloud. I’ve been dragging my heels on figuring this out for quite a while, so it’s great to see the steps described at this level of detail.
Pillar Point Stewards, pypi-to-sqlite, improvements to shot-scraper and appreciating datasette-dashboards
This week I helped Natalie launch the Pillar Point Stewards website and built a new tool for loading PyPI package data into SQLite, in order to help promote the excellent datasette-dashboards plugin by Romain Clement.
[... 1,985 words]@newshomepages (via) Ben Welsh used my shot-scraper tool and GitHub Actions to launch a Twitter bot which tweets screenshots of newspaper homepages on a scheduled basis. Ben says: “The tech is so easy, I was able to pull it off in a couple hours at zero cost. A decade ago I ran a similar project using the cloud resources of the day. [...] It costs thousands of dollars and the screenshots were of much lower quality. Incredible progress!”
2020
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.
[... 993 words]2019
Los Angeles Weedmaps analysis (via) Ben Welsh at the LA Times published this Jupyter notebook showing the full working behind a story they published about LA’s black market weed dispensaries. I picked up several useful tricks from it—including how to load points into a geopandas GeoDataFrame (in epsg:4326 aka WGS 84) and how to then join that against the LA Times neighborhoods GeoJSON boundaries file.
2018
Helicopter accident analysis notebook (via) Ben Welsh worked on an article for the LA Times about helicopter accident rates, and has published the underlying analysis as an extremely detailed Jupyter notebook. Lots of neat new (to me) notebook tricks in here as well.
Django Bakery (via) “A set of helpers for baking your Django site out as flat files”. Released by the LA Times Data Desk, who use it for a large number of projects from election results to data journalism interactives. Statically publishing these projects to S3 lets them handle huge traffic spikes at a very low cost.