March 2021
72 posts: 13 entries, 15 links, 3 quotes, 41 beats
March 15, 2021
sqlite-spellfix (via) I really like this pattern: “pip install sqlite-spellfix” gets you a Python module which includes a compiled (on your system when pip install ran) copy of the SQLite spellfix1 module, plus a utility variable containing its path so you can easily load it into a SQLite connection.
sqlite-uuid (via) Another Python package that wraps a SQLite module written in C: this one provides access to UUID functions as SQLite functions.
VIAL is now live, plus django-sql-dashboard
Our new Django backend has now officially graduated from preview mode! We’ve been running it to collect caller reports for Oregon for over a week now, and today we finally turned off the old Heroku app and promoted https://vial.calltheshots.us/ to be the place that our caller app writes to.
[... 672 words]March 16, 2021
March 17, 2021
logpaste (via) Useful example of how to use the Litestream SQLite replication tool in a Dockerized application: S3 credentials are passed to the container on startup, it then attempts to restore the SQLite database from S3 and starts a Litestream process in the same container to periodically synchronize changes back up to the S3 bucket.
When you have to mock a collaborator, avoid using the Mock object directly. Either use mock.create_autospec() or mock.patch(autospec=True) if at all possible. Autospeccing from the real collaborator means that if the collaborator's interface changes, your tests will fail. Manually speccing or not speccing at all means that changes in the collaborator's interface will not break your tests that use the collaborator: you could have 100% test coverage and your library would fall over when used!
March 18, 2021
How we found and fixed a rare race condition in our session handling. GitHub had a terrifying bug this month where a user reported suddenly being signed in as another user. This is a particularly great example of a security incident report, explaining how GitHub identified the underlying bug, what caused it and the steps they are taking to ensure bugs like that never happen in the future. The root cause was a convoluted sequence of events which could cause a Ruby Hash to be accidentally shared between two requests, caused as a result of a new background thread that was introduced as a performance optimization.
March 19, 2021
March 20, 2021
March 21, 2021
GitHub, by default, writes five replicas of each repository across our three data centers to protect against failures at the server, rack, network, and data center levels. When we need to update Git references, we briefly take a lock across all of the replicas in all of our data centers, and release the lock when our three-phase-commit (3PC) protocol reports success.
Weeknotes: django-sql-dashboard widgets
A few small releases this week, for django-sql-dashboard, datasette-auth-passwords and datasette-publish-vercel.
March 22, 2021
The Accountability Project Datasettes. The Accountability Project “curates, standardizes and indexes public data to give journalists, researchers and others a simple way to search across otherwise siloed records”—they have a wide range of useful data, and they’ve started experimenting with Datasette to provide SQL access to a subset of the information that they have collected.
March 23, 2021
A Complete Guide To Accessible Front-End Components. I’m so excited about this article: it brings together an absolute wealth of resources on accessible front-end components, including many existing component implementations that are accessible out of the box. Date pickers, autocomplete widgets, modals, menus—all sorts of things that I’ve been dragging my heels on implementing because I didn’t fully understand their accessibility implications.
The Airtable formulas at the heart of everything
While working on building a Counties.json API endpoint for VIAL I realized I wasn’t entirely sure how the “Total reports” and “Yeses” numbers in this piece of JSON were calculated:
[... 323 words]March 24, 2021
Understanding JSON Schema (via) Useful, comprehensive short book guide to JSON Schema, which finally helped me feel like I fully understand the specification.