Simon Willison’s Weblog

Reduce Friction. Outstanding essay on software engineering friction and development team productivity by C J Silverio: it explains the concept of “friction” (and gives great definitions of “process”, “ceremony” and “formality” in the process) as it applies to software engineering, lays out the challenges involved in getting organizations to commit to reducing it and then provides actionable advice on how to get consensus and where to invest your efforts in order to make things better.

# 10:25 pm / software-engineering, management

viewport-preview (via) I built a tiny tool which lets you preview a URL in a bunch of different common browser viewport widths, using iframes.

# 12 am / css, iframes, mobile, projects, testing

Cosmopolitan: Compiling Python. Cosmopolitan is Justine Tunney’s “build-once run-anywhere C library”—part of the αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε effort, which produces wildly clever binary executable files that work on multiple different platforms, and is the secret sauce behind redbean. I hadn’t realized this was happening but there’s an active project to get Python to work as this format, producing a new way of running Python applications as standalone executables, only these ones have the potential to run unmodified on Windows, Linux and macOS.

# 8:43 pm / python, redbean, cosmopolitan, justine-tunney

SQLite Internals: Pages & B-trees (via) Ben Johnson provides a delightfully clear introduction to SQLite internals, describing the binary format used to store rows on disk and how SQLite uses 4KB pages for both row storage and for the b-trees used to look up records.

# 2:57 pm / algorithms, databases, sqlite, ben-johnson

Fastest way to turn HTML into text in Python (via) A light benchmark of the new-to-me selectolax Python library shows it performing extremely well for tasks such as extracting just the text from an HTML string, after first manipulating the DOM. selectolax is a Python binding over the Modest and Lexbor HTML parsing engines, which are written in no-outside-dependency C.

# 5:55 pm / html, python

Packaging Python Projects with pyproject.toml. I decided to finally figure out how packaging with pyproject.toml works—all of my existing projects use setup.py. The official tutorial from the Python Packaging Authority (PyPA) had everything I needed.

# 11:18 pm / packaging, python

Introducing sqlite-lines—a SQLite extension for reading files line-by-line (via) Alex Garcia wrote a brilliant C module for SQLIte which adds functions (and a table-valued function) for efficiently reading newline-delimited text into SQLite. When combined with SQLite’s built-in JSON features this means you can read a huge newline-delimited JSON file into SQLite in a streaming fashion so it doesn’t exhaust memory for a large file. Alex also compiled the extension to WebAssembly, and his post here is an Observable notebook post that lets you exercise the code directly.

# 7:18 pm / json, sqlite, observable, webassembly, alex-garcia

GPSJam (via) John Wiseman’s “Daily maps of GPS interference” —a beautiful interactive globe (powered by Mapbox GL) which you can use to see points of heaviest GPS interference over a 24 hour period, using data collected from commercial airline radios by ADS-B Exchange. “From what I can tell the most common reason for aircraft GPS systems to have degraded accuracy is jamming by military systems. At least, the vast majority of aircraft that I see with bad GPS accuracy are flying near conflict zones where GPS jamming is known to occur.”

# 7:51 pm / geospatial, gps, mapping, john-wiseman

GAS-ICS-Sync (via) Google Calendar can subscribe to ICS calendar feeds... but polls for updates less than once every 24 hours (as far as I can tell) greatly limiting their usefulness. Derek Antrican wrote a script using Google App Script which fixes this by polling calendar URLs more often and writing them to your calendar via the write API.

# 11:47 pm / google-calendar, icalendar

Cleaning data with sqlite-utils and Datasette (via) I wrote a new tutorial for the Datasette website, showing how to use sqlite-utils to import a CSV file, clean up the resulting schema, fix date formats and extract some of the columns into a separate table. It’s accompanied by a ten minute video originally recorded for the HYTRADBOI conference.

# 7:57 pm / documentation, tutorials, datasette, sqlite-utils