December 2020
52 posts: 5 entries, 12 links, 7 quotes, 28 beats
Dec. 1, 2020
New for AWS Lambda – Container Image Support. “You can now package and deploy Lambda functions as container images of up to 10 GB in size”—can’t wait to try this out with Datasette.
Scaling Datastores at Slack with Vitess (via) Slack spent three years migrating 99% of their MySQL query load to run against Vitess, the open source MySQL sharding system originally built by YouTube. “Today, we serve 2.3 million QPS at peak. 2M of those queries are reads and 300K are writes. Our median query latency is 2 ms, and our p99 query latency is 11 ms.”
Dec. 3, 2020
The value of a product is the number of problems it can solve divided by the amount of complexity the user needs to keep in their head to use it. Consider an iPhone vs a standard TV remote: an iPhone touchscreen can be used for countless different functions, but there's very little to remember about how it works (tap, drag, swipe, pinch). With a TV remote you have to remember what every button does; the more things you can use the remote for, the more buttons it has. We want to create iPhones, not TV remotes.
Dec. 4, 2020
Command Line Interface Guidelines (via) Aanand Prasad, Ben Firshman, Carl Tashian and Eva Parish provide the missing manual for designing CLI tools in 2020. Deeply researched and clearly presented—I picked up a bunch of useful tips and ideas from reading this, and I’m looking forward to applying them to my own CLI projects.
Discoverable CLIs have comprehensive help texts, provide lots of examples, suggest what command to run next, suggest what to do when there is an error. There are lots of ideas that can be stolen from GUIs to make CLIs easier to learn and use, even for power users.
Dec. 5, 2020
The secrets of Monkey Island’s source code (via) To celebrate the thirty year anniversary of the Secret of Monkey Island the Video Game History Foundation interviewed developer Rod Gilbert and produced this comprehensive collection of cut content and material showing how the game was originally constructed.
Dec. 6, 2020
Weeknotes: github-to-sqlite workflows, datasette-ripgrep enhancements, Datasette 0.52
This week: Improvements to datasette-ripgrep, github-to-sqlite and datasette-graphql, plus Datasette 0.52 and a flurry of dot-releases.
Dec. 7, 2020
Dec. 8, 2020
Cameras and Lenses (via) Fabulous explotable interactive essay by Bartosz Ciechanowski explaining how cameras and lenses work.
Dec. 9, 2020
The case against client certificates (via) Colm MacCárthaigh provides a passionately argued Twitter thread about client certificates and why they should be avoided. I tried using them as an extra layer of protection fir my personal Dogsheep server and ended up abandoning them—certificate management across my devices was too fiddly.
Dec. 10, 2020
Deno 1.6 Release Notes. Two signature features in Deno 1.6 worth paying attention to: a built-in language server for code editors like VS Code, and the “deno compile” command which can build Deno JavaScript/TypeScript projects into standalone binaries. The ability to build binaries has turned out to be a killer feature of both Go and Rust, so seeing it ship as a default capability of a interpreted dynamic language is fascinating. I would love it if Python followed Deno’s example.
Dec. 11, 2020
datasette.io (via) Datasette finally has an official project website, three years after the first release of the software. I built it using Datasette, with custom templates to define the various pages. The site includes news, latest releases, example sites and a new searchable plugin directory.
If you are pre-product market fit it's probably too early to think about event based analytics. If you have a small number of users and are able to talk with all of them, you will get much more meaningful data getting to know them than if you were to set up product analytics. You probably don't have enough users to get meaningful data from product analytics anyways.