Thursday, 16th November 2017
Plotly Falcon SQL Client and the Remarkable Datasette SQLite2API Generator. Lovely write-up of Datasette by Tony Hirst. I’m particularly excited about its applications in the world of data journalism so it’s great to see it starting to get attention from people in that sphere.
Verified cryptography for Firefox 57 (via) Mozilla just became the first browser vendor to ship a formally verified crypto implementation.
Datasette 0.12. I just released v0.12 of Datasette. The most exciting new feature is the ability to display a UI for editing named parameters—so you can construct an arbitrarily complex SQL query, include some named parameters and then link directly to it in Datasette to provide a simple interface for changing those parameters. An example involving Australian dogs is included in the release notes.
gitchangelog. Handy Python utility that can generate a reStructured Text changelog from your git commit log. I used this to help get the Datasette release notes started.
Introducing security alerts on GitHub. This is huge: GitHub’s dependency graph feature now shows any dependencies that have a known security vulnerability, based on CVE IDs—and you can sign up for notifications of new vulnerabilities as well. Only supports Ruby and JavaScript today, but Python support is coming in 2018.
django-multitenant (via) Absolutely fascinating Django library for horizontally sharding a database using a multi-tenant pattern, from the team at Citus. In this pattern every relevant table includes a “tenant_id”, and all queries should specifically select against that ID. Once you have that in place, you can shard your rows across multiple different databases and route to the correct database based on the tenant ID, safe in the knowledge that joins will still work provided they are against other rows belonging to the same tenant.
DSF calls for applicants for a Django Fellow. This is a fantastic opportunity: the Django Software Foundation’s fellowship program is providing the opportunity for a new developer to get paid to work on Django 20-40 hours a week. Tim Graham has held this position full-time for the past three years and is looking to scale back to part-time, hence this new opportunity. Applications are due by December 18, 2017.
now-ab. Intriguing example of a Zeit Now microservice: now-ab is a Node.js HTTP proxy which proxies through to one of two or more other Now-deployed applications based on a cookie. If you don’t have the cookie, it picks a backend at random and sets the cookie. Admittedly this is the easiest part of implementing A/B testing (the hard part is the analytics: tracking exposures and conversions) but as an example of a microservice architectural pattern this is fascinating.