Simon Willison’s Weblog

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April 2020

80 posts: 7 entries, 10 links, 3 quotes, 60 beats

April 1, 2020

Release twitter-to-sqlite 0.20 — Save data from Twitter to a SQLite database
Release twitter-to-sqlite 0.20.1 — Save data from Twitter to a SQLite database

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.

[... 993 words]

April 2, 2020

Several grumpy opinions about remote work at Tailscale. Really useful in-depth reviews of the tools Tailscale are using to build their remote company. “We decided early on—about the time we realized all three cofounders live in different cities—that we were going to go all-in on remote work, at least for engineering, which for now is almost all our work. As several people have pointed out before, fully remote is generally more stable than partly remote.”

# 2:48 pm / remote, tailscale

April 3, 2020

Django Release Cycle (via) Really nice visual representation of Django’s release cycle, built by Jeff Triplett as a remix of the Python release cycle by Dustin Ingram.

# 4:56 pm / django, jeff-triplett

April 4, 2020

Zeit Now v1 to sunset soon: no new deployments from 1st May, total shutdown 7th August. I posted a thread on Twitter with some thoughts. Zeit Now v1 remains the best hosting platform I’ve ever used given my particular tastes. They’ve handled the shutdown very responsibly, but I’m sad to see it go.

# 5:32 am / hosting, zeit-now, datasette

April 7, 2020

Release datasette-publish-vercel 0.1a — Datasette plugin for publishing data using Vercel
Release datasette-publish-vercel 0.2a — Datasette plugin for publishing data using Vercel

New developer features in Firefox 75 (via) Firefox 75 just came out with a bunch of new developer features. My favourite is instant evaluation in the JavaScript console: any statement without side effects now shows a preview of its results as you type.

# 7:23 pm / firefox, javascript

April 8, 2020

Release datasette-cluster-map 0.9.1 — Datasette plugin that shows a map for any data with latitude/longitude columns

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.

[... 2,050 words]

Release datasette-publish-vercel 0.3a — Datasette plugin for publishing data using Vercel

April 9, 2020

Release datasette-publish-vercel 0.4a — Datasette plugin for publishing data using Vercel
Release datasette-jq 0.2.1 — Datasette plugin that adds a custom SQL function for executing jq expressions against JSON values

April 10, 2020

Release datasette-auth-github 0.12 — Datasette plugin that authenticates users against GitHub

April 13, 2020

Release sqlite-utils 2.5 — Python CLI utility and library for manipulating SQLite databases
Release datasette-clone 0.1 — Create a local copy of database files from a Datasette instance
Release datasette-clone 0.2 — Create a local copy of database files from a Datasette instance

April 14, 2020

datasette-clone

I released a fun little Datasette utility today: datasette-clone.

[... 379 words]

Release datasette-clone 0.3 — Create a local copy of database files from a Datasette instance
Release datasette-mask-columns 0.1 — Datasette plugin that masks specified database columns
Release datasette-mask-columns 0.2 — Datasette plugin that masks specified database columns
Release datasette-clone 0.4 — Create a local copy of database files from a Datasette instance
Release datasette-clone 0.4.1 — Create a local copy of database files from a Datasette instance
Release paginate-json 0.3 — Command-line tool for fetching JSON from paginated APIs

April 15, 2020

Release datasette-auth-existing-cookies 0.7 — Datasette plugin that authenticates users based on existing domain cookies

April 16, 2020

Release sqlite-utils 2.6 — Python CLI utility and library for manipulating SQLite databases

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.

[... 901 words]

Release github-to-sqlite 1.0.1 — Save data from GitHub to a SQLite database

SQL is a better API language than GraphQL – Convince me otherwise (via) A flippant tweet I posted this morning blew up today and ended up on the Hacker News homepage.

# 10:44 pm / hacker-news, sql, webapis, graphql

2020 » April

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