Simon Willison’s Weblog

free-for.dev (via) It’s pretty amazing how much you can build on free tiers these days—perfect for experimenting with side-projects. free-for.dev collects free SaaS tools for developers via pull request, and has had contributions from over 500 people. # 26th December 2019, 10:03 am

Unicode code converter (via) Fantastically useful tool to convert strings of characters in to every unicode and/or escaping syntax you can possibly imagine. # 15th December 2009, 10:10 pm

Toy Chest: Online or Downloadable Tools for Building Projects (via) “Toy Chest collects online or downloadable software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills (but with basic computer and Internet literacy) can use to create interesting projects”—a fantastic list compiled by the English Department at UCSB. # 29th July 2009, 12:12 pm

Nmap 5.00 Release Notes. Released today, “the most important Nmap release since 1997”. New features include Ncat, a powerful netcat alternative, Ndiff, a utility for comparing scan results so you can spot changes to your network, and a new Nmap Scripting Engine using Lua. # 16th July 2009, 7:40 pm

Tools of the Modern Python Hacker: Virtualenv, Fabric and Pip. Ashamed to say I’m not using any of these yet—for Django projects, my manage.py inserts an “ext” directory at the beginning of the Python path which contains my dependencies for that project. # 9th July 2009, 11:40 am

aws—simple access to Amazon EC2 and S3. The best command line client I’ve found for EC2 and S3. “aws put --progress my-bucket-name/large-file.tar.gz large-file.tar.gz” is particularly useful for uploading large files to S3. Written in Perl (with no dependencies), shelling out to curl to do the heavy lifting. # 19th May 2009, 11:38 am

The CSS Redundancy Checker. A tool for checking your markup for outdated CSS rules that don’t match any of your HTML. We were discussing the need for something similar to this at Torchbox a few weeks ago. # 6th July 2007, 12:02 pm