Simon Willison’s Weblog

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June 2022

51 posts: 8 entries, 7 links, 2 quotes, 34 beats

June 3, 2022

Release datasette-upload-csvs 0.7 — Datasette plugin for uploading CSV files and converting them to database tables
Sighting 4:49 PM – 4:57 PM — Brown Pelican, Flowering Plants
Brown Pelican
Brown Pelican
Flowering Plants
Flowering Plants

June 5, 2022

How to use the GPT-3 language model

Visit How to use the GPT-3 language model

I ran a Twitter poll the other day asking if people had tried GPT-3 and why or why not. The winning option, by quite a long way, was “No, I don’t know how to”. So here’s how to try it out, for free, without needing to write any code.

[... 838 words]

June 6, 2022

None
TIL Using just with Django — Jeff Triplett [convinced me](https://twitter.com/webology/status/1532860591307726851) to take a look at [just](https://github.com/casey/just) as a command automation tool - sort of an alternative to Make, except with a focus on commands rather than managing build dependencies.

June 7, 2022

Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud ready to preview

I made an absolute ton of progress building Datasette Cloud on Fly this week, and also had a bunch of fun playing with GPT-3.

[... 370 words]

June 8, 2022

Announcing Pyston-lite: our Python JIT as an extension module (via) The Pyston JIT can now be installed in any Python 3.8 virtual environment by running “pip install pyston_lite_autoload”—which includes a hook to automatically inject the JIT. I just tried a very rough benchmark against Datasette (ab -n 1000 -c 10) and got 391.20 requests/second without the JIT compared to 404.10 request/second with it.

# 5:58 pm / jit, performance, python

The End of Localhost. swyx makes the argument for cloud-based development environments, and points out that many large companies—including Google, Facebook, Shopify and GitHub—have made the move already. I was responsible for the team maintaining the local development environment experience at Eventbrite for a while, and my conclusion is that with a large enough engineering team someone will ALWAYS find a new way to break their local environment: the idea of being able to bootstrap a fresh, guaranteed-to-work environment in the cloud at the click of a button could save SO much time and money.

# 6:09 pm / software-engineering, swyx

None
TIL Making HTTP calls using IPv6 — Tiny TIL today: I learned how to make an HTTP call to an IPv6 address. The trick is to enclose the address in the URL in square braces:
None
TIL Formatting thousands in Jinja — Here's how to format a number in Jinja with commas for thousands, without needing any custom filters or template functions:

June 9, 2022

Release datasette-upload-csvs 0.7.1 — Datasette plugin for uploading CSV files and converting them to database tables
Release datasette-socrata 0.1 — Import data from Socrata into Datasette

June 10, 2022

Release datasette-socrata 0.1.1 — Import data from Socrata into Datasette
Release datasette-ics 0.5.1 — Datasette plugin for outputting iCalendar files

June 11, 2022

Release datasette-socrata 0.2 — Import data from Socrata into Datasette
Release datasette-low-disk-space-hook 0.1a0 — Datasette plugin providing the low_disk_space hook for other plugins to check for low disk space

June 12, 2022

A tiny web app to create images from OpenStreetMap maps

Visit A tiny web app to create images from OpenStreetMap maps

Earlier today I found myself wanting to programmatically generate some images of maps.

[... 1,388 words]

Twenty years of my blog

Visit Twenty years of my blog

I started this blog on June 12th 2002—twenty years ago today! To celebrate two decades of blogging, I decided to pull together some highlights and dive down a self-indulgent nostalgia hole.

[... 4,455 words]

June 13, 2022

Making Code Faster. Tim Bray’s detailed guide to using the Go profiler.

# 7:40 pm / go, profiling, tim-bray

Sighting 3:59 PM — Black Oystercatcher
Black Oystercatcher
Black Oystercatcher

June 14, 2022

None
TIL Using iconv to convert the text encoding of a file — In [sqlite-utils issue 439](https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/issues/439) I was testing against a CSV file that used UTF16 little endian encoding, also known as `utf-16-le`.

June 15, 2022

Release sqlite-utils 3.27 — Python CLI utility and library for manipulating SQLite databases
Sighting 12:06 PM – 1:15 PM — Common Raven, European Starling, California Ground Squirrel
Common Raven
Common Raven
European Starling
European Starling
California Ground Squirrel
California Ground Squirrel

June 17, 2022

Sighting 8:10 AM – 11:16 AM — Pacific Harbor Seal, White-speckled Dorid, Ochre Sea Star, Brown Pelican, Great Blue Heron
Pacific Harbor Seal
Pacific Harbor Seal
White-speckled Dorid
White-speckled Dorid
Ochre Sea Star
Ochre Sea Star
Brown Pelican
Brown Pelican
Great Blue Heron
Great Blue Heron
None
TIL Registering new Datasette plugin hooks by defining them in other plugins — I'm experimenting with a Datasette plugin that itself adds new plugin hooks which other plugins can then interact with.
Release datasette-low-disk-space-hook 0.1 — Datasette plugin providing the low_disk_space hook for other plugins to check for low disk space
Release datasette-socrata 0.3 — Import data from Socrata into Datasette

June 18, 2022

Becoming a good engineer is about collecting experience. Each project, even small ones, is a chance to add new techniques and tools to your toolbox. Where this delivers even more value is when you can solve problems by pairing techniques learned on one project with tools learned working on another. It all adds up.

Addy Osmani

# 9:21 pm / careers, addy-osmani

June 19, 2022

Weeknotes: datasette-socrata, and the last 10%...

... takes 90% of the work. I continue to work towards a preview of the new Datasette Cloud, and keep finding new “just one more things” to delay inviting in users.

[... 1,214 words]

WarcDB (via) Florents Tselai built this tool for loading web crawl data stored in WARC (Web ARChive) format into a SQLite database for smaller-scale analysis with SQL, on top of my sqlite-utils Python library.

# 6:08 pm / archiving, sqlite, sqlite-utils

June 20, 2022

The State of WebAssembly 2022. Colin Eberhardt talks through the results of the State of WebAssembly 2022 survey. Rust continues to dominate as the most popular language for working to WebAssembly, but Python has a notable increase of interest.

# 6:07 pm / rust, webassembly

2022 » June

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