Simon Willison’s Weblog

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166 items tagged “weeknotes”

2022

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.

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Weeknotes: Datasette, sqlite-utils, Datasette Desktop

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Weeknotes: Camping, a road trip and two new museums

Natalie and I took a week-long road trip and camping holiday. The plan was to camp on Santa Rosa Island in the California Channel Islands, but the boat to the island was cancelled due to bad weather. We treated ourselves to a Central Californian road trip instead.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, nogil Python, HYTRADBOI

My big project this week was Datasette Lite, a new way to run Datasette directly in a browser, powered by WebAssembly and Pyodide. I also continued my research into running SQL queries in parallel, described last week. Plus I spoke at HYTRADBOI.

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Weeknotes: Parallel SQL queries for Datasette, plus some middleware tricks

A promising new performance optimization for Datasette, plus new datasette-gzip and datasette-total-page-time plugins.

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Building a Covid sewage Twitter bot (and other weeknotes)

I built a new Twitter bot today: @covidsewage. It tweets a daily screenshot of the latest Covid sewage monitoring data published by Santa Clara county.

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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.

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Weeknotes: datasette-auth0

Datasette 0.61, a Twitter Space and a new Datasette plugin for authenticating against Auth0.

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Weeknotes: Tildes not dashes, and the big refactor

After last week’s shot-scraper distractions with Playwright, this week I finally managed to make some concrete progress on the path towards Datasette 1.0.

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Weeknotes: Distracted by Playwright

My goal for this week was to unblock progress on Datasette by finally finishing the dash encoding implementation I described last week. I was getting close, and then I got very distracted by Playwright.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Tutorials

I published two new tutorials for Datasette this week, both focused at end-users of the web application.

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Google Drive to SQLite

I released a new tool this week: google-drive-to-sqlite. It’s a CLI utility for fetching metadata about files in your Google Drive and writing them to a local SQLite database.

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Using SQLite and Datasette with Fly Volumes

A few weeks ago, Fly announced Free Postgres Databases as part of the free tier of their hosting product. Their announcement included this snippet:

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Help scraping: track changes to CLI tools by recording their --help using Git

I’ve been experimenting with a new variant of Git scraping this week which I’m calling Help scraping. The key idea is to track changes made to CLI tools over time by recording the output of their --help commands in a Git repository.

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Weeknotes: python_requires, documentation SEO

Fixed Datasette on Python 3.6 for the last time. Worked on documentation infrastructure improvements. Spent some time with Fly Volumes.

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Weeknotes: s3-credentials prefix and Datasette 0.60

A new release of s3-credentials with support for restricting access to keys that start with a prefix, Datasette 0.60 and a write-up of my process for shipping a feature.

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What’s new in sqlite-utils 3.20 and 3.21: --lines, --text, --convert

sqlite-utils is my combined CLI tool and Python library for manipulating SQLite databases. Consider this the annotated release notes for sqlite-utils 3.20 and 3.21, both released in the past week.

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Weeknotes: Taking a break in Moss Landing

Took some time off. Saw some whales and sea otters. Added a new spot to Niche Museums.

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2021

Weeknotes: datasette-tiddlywiki, filters_from_request

I made some good progress on the big refactor this week, including extracting some core logic out into a new Datasette plugin hook. I also got distracted by TiddlyWiki and released a new Datasette plugin that lets you run TiddlyWiki inside Datasette.

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Weeknotes: Trapped in an eternal refactor

I’m still working on refactoring Datasette’s table view. In doing so I spun out a new plugin, datasette-pretty-traces, which improves Datasette’s tooling for seeing the SQL that was executed to build a specific page.

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Weeknotes: git-history, bug magnets and s3-credentials --public

I’ve stopped considering my projects “shipped” until I’ve written a proper blog entry about them, so yesterday I finally shipped git-history, coinciding with the release of version 0.6—a full 27 days after the first 0.1.

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Weeknotes: Shaving some beautiful yaks

I’ve been mostly shaving yaks this week—two in particular: the Datasette table refactor and the next release of git-history. I also built and released my first Web Component!

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Weeknotes: Apache proxies in Docker containers, refactoring Datasette

Updates to six major projects this week, plus finally some concrete progress towards Datasette 1.0.

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Weeknotes: git-history, created for a Git scraping workshop

My main project this week was a 90 minute workshop I delivered about Git scraping at Coda.Br 2021, a Brazilian data journalism conference, on Friday. This inspired the creation of a brand new tool, git-history, plus smaller improvements to a range of other projects.

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Weeknotes: datasette-jupyterlite, s3-credentials and a Python packaging talk

My big project this week was s3-credentials, described yesterday—but I also put together a fun expermiental Datasette plugin bundling JupyterLite and wrote up my PyGotham talk on Python packaging.

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