Simon Willison’s Weblog

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178 items tagged “weeknotes”

2020

Weeknotes: incremental improvements

I’ve been writing my talk for PyCon Argentina this week, which has proved surprisingly time consuming. I hope to have that wrapped up soon—I’m pre-recording it, which it turns out is much more work than preparing a talk to stream live.

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Weeknotes: evernote-to-sqlite, Datasette Weekly, scrapers, csv-diff, sqlite-utils

This week I built evernote-to-sqlite (see Building an Evernote to SQLite exporter), launched the Datasette Weekly newsletter, worked on some scrapers and pushed out some small improvements to several other projects.

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Weeknotes: Mainly Datasette 0.50

Most of what I’ve been up to this week is covered in Datasette 0.50: The annotated release notes and Git scraping: track changes over time by scraping to a Git repository.

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Weeknotes: Datasette column actions, plus three new plugins

A renewed emphasis on building out Datasette Cloud has produced three new plugins this week: datasette-dateutil, datasette-import-table and datasette-edit-schema, plus a major improvement to Datasette’s default interface for browsing tables.

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Weeknotes: software carpentry, compiling modules for SQLite

This week I completed the Software Carpentry instructor training course, added two foundational features to sqlite-utils and learned how to compile modules for SQLite.

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Weeknotes: datasette-seaborn, fivethirtyeight-polls

This week I released Datasette 0.49 and tinkered with datasette-seaborn, dogsheep-beta and polling data from FiveThirtyEight.

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Weeknotes: datasette-dump, sqlite-backup, talks

I spent some time this week digging into Python’s sqlite3 internals. I also gave two talks and recorded a third, due to air at PyGotham in October.

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Weeknotes: airtable-export, generating screenshots in GitHub Actions, Dogsheep!

This week I figured out how to populate Datasette from Airtable, wrote code to generate social media preview card page screenshots using Puppeteer, and made a big breakthrough with my Dogsheep project.

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Weeknotes: California Protected Areas in Datasette

This week I built a geospatial search engine for protected areas in California, shipped datasette-graphql 1.0 and started working towards the next milestone for Datasette Cloud.

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Weeknotes: Rocky Beaches, Datasette 0.48, a commit history of my database

This week I helped Natalie launch Rocky Beaches, shipped Datasette 0.48 and several releases of datasette-graphql, upgraded the CSRF protection for datasette-upload-csvs and figured out how to get a commit log of changes to my blog by backing up its database to a GitHub repository.

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Weeknotes: Installing Datasette with Homebrew, more GraphQL, WAL in SQLite

This week I’ve been working on making Datasette easier to install, plus wide-ranging improvements to the Datasette GraphQL plugin.

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GraphQL in Datasette with the new datasette-graphql plugin

This week I’ve mostly been building datasette-graphql, a plugin that adds GraphQL query support to Datasette.

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Fun with binary data and SQLite

This week I’ve been mainly experimenting with binary data storage in SQLite. sqlite-utils can now insert data from binary files, and datasette-media can serve content over HTTP that originated as binary BLOBs in a database file.

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Weeknotes: datasette-copyable, datasette-insert-api

Two new Datasette plugins this week: datasette-copyable, helping users copy-and-paste data from Datasette into other places, and datasette-insert-api, providing a JSON API for inserting and updating data and creating tables.

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Weeknotes: datasette-auth-passwords, a Datasette logo and a whole lot more

All sorts of project updates this week.

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Weeknotes: SBA Covid-19 PPP loans, Datasette talks, Datasette plugin upgrades

This week I’ve mainly been exploring Small Business Administration Covid-19 loans data, pitching some talks and upgrading some plugins for compatibility with Datasette 0.44+.

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Datasette 0.45: The annotated release notes

Datasette 0.45, out today, features magic parameters for canned queries, a log out feature, improved plugin documentation and four new plugin hooks.

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Weeknotes: cookiecutter templates, better plugin documentation, sqlite-generate

I spent this week spreading myself between a bunch of smaller projects, and finally getting familiar with cookiecutter. I wrote about my datasette-plugin cookiecutter template earlier in the week; here’s what else I’ve been working on.

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Weeknotes: Datasette alphas for testing new plugin hooks

A relatively quiet week this week, compared to last week’s massive push to ship Datasette 0.44 with authentication, permissions and writable canned queries. I can now ship alpha releases, such as today’s Datasette 0.45a1, which means I can preview new plugin features before they are completely ready and stable.

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Datasette 0.44: The annotated release notes

I just released Datasette 0.44 to PyPI. With 128 commits since 0.43 this is the biggest release in a long time—and likely the last major release of new features before Datasette 1.0.

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Weeknotes, I guess

What a week. Hard to work up the enthusiasm to write about what I’ve been working on.

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Weeknotes: Datasette 0.43

My main achievement this week was shipping Datasette 0.43, with a collection of smaller improvements and one big one: a redesign of the register_output_renderer plugin hook.

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Using SQL to find my best photo of a pelican according to Apple Photos

According to the Apple Photos internal SQLite database, this is the most aesthetically pleasing photograph I have ever taken of a pelican:

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Weeknotes: Working on my screenplay

I’m taking an Introduction to Screenwriting course with Adam Tobin at Stanford, and my partial screenplay is due this week. I’m pulling together some scenes that tell the story of the Russian 1917 February Revolution and the fall of the Tsar through the lens of the craftsmen working on the Tsar’s last Fabergé egg. So I’ve not been spending much time on anything else.

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Weeknotes: Datasette 0.41, photos breakthroughs

Shorter weeknotes this week, because my main project for the week warrants a detailed write-up on its own (coming soon... update 21st May here it is).

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Weeknotes: Archiving coronavirus.data.gov.uk, custom pages and directory configuration in Datasette, photos-to-sqlite

I mainly made progress on three projects this week: Datasette, photos-to-sqlite and a cleaner way of archiving data to a git repository.

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Weeknotes: Datasette 0.40, various projects, Dogsheep photos

A new release of Datasette, two new projects and progress towards a Dogsheep photos solution.

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Weeknotes: Hacking on 23 different projects

I wrote a lot of code this week: 184 commits over 23 repositories! I’ve also started falling for Zeit Now v2, having found workarounds for some of my biggest problems with it.

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Goodbye Zeit Now v1, hello datasette-publish-now—and talking to myself in GitHub issues

This week I’ve been mostly dealing with the finally announced shutdown of Zeit Now v1. And having long-winded conversations with myself in GitHub issues.

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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.

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