Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe
Atom feed for weeknotes

189 items tagged “weeknotes”

I publish weeknotes once every two or three weeks documenting what I've been working on recently.

2023

Weeknotes: sqlite-utils 3.31, download-esm, Python in a sandbox

A couple of speaking appearances last week—one planned, one unplanned. Plus sqlite-utils 3.31, download-esm and a new TIL.

[... 608 words]

Weeknotes: Miscellaneous research into Rye, ChatGPT Code Interpreter and openai-to-sqlite

I gave myself some time off stressing about my core responsibilities this week after PyCon, which meant allowing myself to be distracted by some miscellaneous research projects.

[... 891 words]

Weeknotes: Citus Con, PyCon and three new niche museums

I’ve had a busy week in terms of speaking: on Tuesday I gave an online keynote at Citus Con, “Big Opportunities in Small Data”. I then flew to Salt Lake City for PyCon that evening and gave a three hour workshop on Wednesday, “Data analysis with SQLite and Python”.

[... 225 words]

sqlite-history: tracking changes to SQLite tables using triggers (also weeknotes)

Visit sqlite-history: tracking changes to SQLite tables using triggers (also weeknotes)

In between blogging about ChatGPT rhetoric, micro-benchmarking with ChatGPT Code Interpreter and Why prompt injection is an even bigger problem now I managed to ship the beginnings of a new project: sqlite-history.

[... 1,680 words]

Weeknotes: A new llm CLI tool, plus automating my weeknotes and newsletter

Visit Weeknotes: A new llm CLI tool, plus automating my weeknotes and newsletter

I started publishing weeknotes in 2019 partly as a way to hold myself accountable but mainly as a way to encourage myself to write more.

[... 830 words]

Weeknotes: AI won’t slow down, a new newsletter and a huge Datasette refactor

I’m a few weeks behind on my weeknotes, but it’s not through lack of attention to my blog. AI just keeps getting weirder and more interesting.

[... 1,255 words]

Weeknotes: NICAR, and an appearance on KQED Forum

I spent most of this week at NICAR 2023, the data journalism conference hosted this year in Nashville, Tennessee.

[... 1,941 words]

Thoughts and impressions of AI-assisted search from Bing

Visit Thoughts and impressions of AI-assisted search from Bing

It’s been a wild couple of weeks.

[... 1,763 words]

Weeknotes: A bunch of things I learned this week, plus datasette-explain

Visit Weeknotes: A bunch of things I learned this week, plus datasette-explain

The Datasette table view refactor, JSON redesign and ?_extra= continues this week, mainly in this ongoing pull request and this tracking issue.

[... 1,528 words]

datasette-scraper, Big Local News and other weeknotes

Visit datasette-scraper, Big Local News and other weeknotes

In addition to exploring the new MusicCaps training and evaluation data I’ve been working on the big Datasette JSON refactor, and getting excited about a Datasette project that I didn’t work on at all.

[... 1,744 words]

Weeknotes: AI hacking and a SpatiaLite tutorial

Short weeknotes this time because the key things I worked on have already been covered here:

2022

2022 in projects and blogging

In lieu of my regular weeknotes (I took two weeks off for the holidays) here’s a look back at 2022, mainly in terms of projects and things I’ve written about.

Weeknotes: Datasette 0.63.3, datasette-ripgrep

Visit Weeknotes: Datasette 0.63.3, datasette-ripgrep

We’re back in the UK to see family over Christmas (our first trip back since 2019). Here are a few notes from the past couple of weeks.

[... 801 words]

Weeknotes: datasette-ephemeral-tables, datasette-export

Most of what I’ve been working on for the past week and a half is already documented:

[... 603 words]

Weeknotes: Implementing a write API, Mastodon distractions

Everything is so distracting at the moment. The ongoing Twitter catastrophe, the great migration (at least amongst most of the people I pay attention to) to Mastodon, the FTX calamity. It’s been very hard to focus!

[... 916 words]

Designing a write API for Datasette

Building out Datasette Cloud has made one thing clear to me: Datasette needs a write API for ingesting new data into its attached SQLite databases.

[... 1,493 words]

Weeknotes: DjangoCon, SQLite in Django, datasette-gunicorn

I spent most of this week at DjangoCon in San Diego—my first outside-of-the-Bay-Area conference since the before-times.

[... 1,184 words]

Weeknotes: Publishing data using Datasette Cloud

My initial preview releases of Datasette Cloud (the SaaS version of my Datasette open source project) have focused on private data collaboration.

[... 582 words]

Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud preview invitations

Visit Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud preview invitations

This week I finally started sending out invitations for people to try out the preview of the new Datasette Cloud, my SaaS offering for Datasette.

[... 713 words]

Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, s3-credentials, shot-scraper, datasette-edit-templates and more

Visit Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, s3-credentials, shot-scraper, datasette-edit-templates and more

Despite distractions from AI I managed to make progress on a bunch of different projects this week, including new releases of s3-credentials and shot-scraper, a new datasette-edit-templates plugin and a small but neat improvement to Datasette Lite.

[... 1,562 words]

Exploring the training data behind Stable Diffusion

Visit Exploring the training data behind Stable Diffusion

Two weeks ago, the Stable Diffusion image generation model was released to the public. I wrote about this last week, in Stable Diffusion is a really big deal—a post which has since become one of the top ten results for “stable diffusion” on Google and shown up in all sorts of different places online.

[... 2,897 words]

Building a searchable archive for the San Francisco Microscopical Society

Visit Building a searchable archive for the San Francisco Microscopical Society

The San Francisco Microscopical Society was founded in 1870 by a group of scientists dedicated to advancing the field of microscopy.

[... 1,845 words]

Litestream backups for Datasette Cloud (and weeknotes)

My main focus this week has been adding robust backups to the forthcoming Datasette Cloud.

[... 1,604 words]

Weeknotes: Joining the board of the Python Software Foundation

Visit Weeknotes: Joining the board of the Python Software Foundation

A few weeks ago I was elected to the board of directors for the Python Software Foundation.

[... 2,081 words]

Weeknotes: Datasette, sqlite-utils, Datasette Desktop

A flurry of releases this week, including a new Datasette alpha and a fixed Datasette Desktop.

[... 1,113 words]

sqlite-comprehend: run AWS entity extraction against content in a SQLite database

I built a new tool this week: sqlite-comprehend, which passes text from a SQLite database through the AWS Comprehend entity extraction service and stores the returned entities.

[... 1,146 words]

s3-ocr: Extract text from PDF files stored in an S3 bucket

Visit s3-ocr: Extract text from PDF files stored in an S3 bucket

I’ve released s3-ocr, a new tool that runs Amazon’s Textract OCR text extraction against PDF files in an S3 bucket, then writes the resulting text out to a SQLite database with full-text search configured so you can run searches against the extracted data.

[... 1,493 words]

Weeknotes: datasette-socrata, and the last 10%...

... takes 90% of the work. I continue to work towards a preview of the new Datasette Cloud, and keep finding new “just one more things” to delay inviting in users.

[... 1,214 words]

Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud ready to preview

I made an absolute ton of progress building Datasette Cloud on Fly this week, and also had a bunch of fun playing with GPT-3.

[... 370 words]

Weeknotes: Building Datasette Cloud on Fly Machines, Furo for documentation

Visit Weeknotes: Building Datasette Cloud on Fly Machines, Furo for documentation

Hosting provider Fly released Fly Machines this week. I got an early preview and I’ve been working with it for a few days—it’s a fascinating new piece of technology. I’m using it to get my hosting service for Datasette ready for wider release.

[... 1,005 words]