March 2021
72 posts: 13 entries, 15 links, 3 quotes, 41 beats
March 1, 2021
Drawing the rest of the owl
My ambitious goal for the day was to get the new Django/PostgreSQL preview into a state where we could start sending example API requests to it from the help.vaccinate app.
How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% (via) Incredible debugging war story: t0st was fed up of waiting six minutes (!) for GTA Online to load on their PC, so they used a host of devious debugging tricks to try and figure out what was going on. It turned out the game was loading a 10MB JSON file detailing all of the available in-game purchases, but inefficient JSON parsing meant it was pegging an entire CPU for 4 minutes mainly running the strlen() C function. Despite not having access to source code or debugging symbols t0st figured out the problem and managed to inject a custom DLL that hooked some internal functions and dropped load times down from 6m down to to 1m50s!
March 2, 2021
API ready for testing, first video status update
To celebrate GitHub’s new support for drag-and-dropping mp4 files into Markdown, I decided to switch things around a little and include a video update with today’s blog entry.
[... 656 words]March 3, 2021
Replaying logs to exercise the new API
22 days ago n1mmy pushed a change to help.vaccinate which logged full details of inoming Netlify function API traffic to an Airtable database.
March 4, 2021
google-cloud-4-words. This is really useful: every Google Cloud service (all 250 of them) with a four word description explaining what it does. I'd love to see the same thing for AWS.
Update: Turns out I had.
March 5, 2021
Git scraping, the five minute lightning talk
I prepared a lightning talk about Git scraping for the NICAR 2021 data journalism conference. In the talk I explain the idea of running scheduled scrapers in GitHub Actions, show some examples and then live code a new scraper for the CDC’s vaccination data using the GitHub web interface. Here’s the video.
[... 289 words]The SOC2 Starting Seven (via) "So, you plan to sell your startup’s product to big companies one day. Congratu-dolences! [...] Here’s how we’ll try to help: with Seven Things you can do now that will simplify SOC2 for you down the road while making your life, or at least your security posture, materially better in the immediacy.
March 6, 2021
The simplest possible call queue
Today I’ve been working on the queue calling mechanism for the new Django backend.
[... 471 words]March 7, 2021
Weeknotes: Datasette and Git scraping at NICAR, VaccinateCA
This week I virtually attended the NICAR data journalism conference and made a ton of progress on the Django backend for VaccinateCA (see last week).
[... 773 words]New call queue ready to test. Also geography.
I just shipped the first working preview version of the new /api/requestCall API [#54]—the API that our caller app uses to get the next location that the caller should be contacting (and lock it so that other users don’t call it at the same time).
March 8, 2021
March 9, 2021
APIs for importing locations
An important aspect of the new backend is the ability to import new locations.
[... 254 words]March 11, 2021
March 12, 2021
March 13, 2021
March 14, 2021
Weeknotes: tableau-to-sqlite, django-sql-dashboard
This week I started a limited production run of my new backend for Vaccinate CA calling, built a tableau-to-sqlite import tool and started working on a subset of Datasette for PostgreSQL and Django called django-sql-dashboard.