January 2022
50 posts: 7 entries, 14 links, 3 quotes, 26 beats
Jan. 19, 2022
Jan. 20, 2022
How to Add a Favicon to Your Django Site
(via)
Adam Johnson did the research on the best way to handle favicons - Safari still doesn't handle SVG icons so the best solution today is a PNG served from the /favicon.ico path. This article inspired me to finally add a proper favicon to Datasette.
Jan. 21, 2022
Roblox Return to Service 10/28-10/31 2021 (via) A particularly good example of a public postmortem on an outage. Roblox was down for 72 hours last year, as a result of an extremely complex set of circumstances which took a lot of effort to uncover. It’s interesting to think through what kind of monitoring you would need to have in place to help identify the root cause of this kind of issue.
Jan. 25, 2022
Observable Plot Cheatsheets (via) Beautiful new set of cheatsheets by Mike Freeman for the Observable Plot charting library. This is really top notch documentation—the cheatsheets are available as printable PDFs but the real value here is in the interactive versions of them, which include Observable-powered sliders to tweak the different examples and copy out the resulting generated code.
Weeknotes: python_requires, documentation SEO
Fixed Datasette on Python 3.6 for the last time. Worked on documentation infrastructure improvements. Spent some time with Fly Volumes.
[... 1,497 words]Jan. 26, 2022
Jan. 27, 2022
Two reasons Kubernetes is so complex (via) I like how this article proposes that Kubernetes isn’t trying to be a tool for deploying containers—it’s more like an operating system for a cluster of machines, responsible for the same kind of goals as a regular operating system such as resource sharing and portability. And since everything is built as control loops which attempt to modify actual state to fit the declarative desired state, errors can occur asynchronously seconds or even minutes after the desired state has been updated.
Consistent with the practices outlined in SP 800-63B, agencies must remove password policies that require special characters and regular password rotation from all systems within one year of the issuance of this memorandum. These requirements have long been known to lead to weaker passwords in real-world use and should not be employed by the Federal Government.
— Memo: Moving the U.S. Government Toward Zero Trust Cybersecurity Principles
The baseline for web development in 2022 (via) “TL;DR:The baseline for web development in 2022 is: low-spec Android devices in terms of performance, Safari from two years before in terms of Web Standards, and 4G in terms of networks. The web in general is not answering those needs properly, especially in terms of performance where factors such as an over-dependence on JavaScript are hindering our sites’ performance.”
Jan. 30, 2022
Black 22.1.0 (via) Black, the uncompromising code formatter for Python, has had its first stable non-beta release after almost four years of releases. I adopted Black a few years ago for all of my projects and I wouldn’t release Python code without it now—the productivity boost I get from not spending even a second thinking about code formatting and indentation is huge.
I know Django has been holding off on adopting it until a stable release was announced, so hopefully that will happen soon.
Mypyc (via) Spotted this in the Black release notes: “Black is now compiled with mypyc for an overall 2x speed-up”. Mypyc is a tool that compiles Python modules (written in a subset of Python) to C extensions—similar to Cython but using just Python syntax, taking advantage of type annotations to perform type checking and type inference. It’s part of the mypy type checking project, which has been using it since 2019 to gain a 4x performance improvement over regular Python.
A CGo-free port of SQLite. Fascinating Go version of SQLite, which uses Go code that has been translated from the original SQLite C using ccgo, a package by the same author which “translates cc ASTs to Go source code”. It claims to pass the full public SQLite test suite, which is very impressive.
Jan. 31, 2022
Writing better release notes
Release notes are an important part of the open source process. I’ve been thinking about these a lot recently, and I’ve assembled some thoughts on how to do a better job with them.
[... 918 words]