Notes on software engineering
421–440 of 547 posts, newest first.
I decided to make a GitHub repository public today that had previously been private. Unfortunately the revision history of that repository included some secret values, one of which I could not figure…
You can search for a string in any resource loaded by a page (including across HTML, JavaScript and CSS) in the Debugger pane by hitting Command+Shift+F.
Inspired by this tweet by Mike Driscoll I decided to try using Fabric to run commands over SSH from a Python script, using a public key for authentication.
I wanted to browse a backup copy of my Plex database, which is a SQLite file. I tried this: The module is an optional module for SQLite.
I tried using a gin index to speed up queries against a column. PostgreSQL: More performance for LIKE and ILIKE statements provided useful background.
I ran a Google search this morning for and when I clicked on the top result it jumped me to a highlighted snippet of text on the page, despite that page not having relevant anchor links.
For complicated reasons I found myself wanting to write Python code to resolve a graph of dependencies and produce a plan for efficiently executing them, in parallel where possible.
The GitHub Code Search beta is really powerful - it allows advanced search - including regular expression matches - against every public repo on GitHub.
I wanted to include some example Python tests in the Datasette documentation - but since they were tests, I also wanted to execute them as part of my test suite to make sure they worked correctly.
Via Brian LeRoux I found single-file-web-component.html by Kristofer Joseph. It's really clever! It demonstrates how to build a custom Web Component in a single HTML file, using some neat tricks.
I wanted to use the GitHub GraphQL API to return all of the repositories on the https://github.com/topics/git-scraping page.
David Beazley on Twitter: So, I just published this deliciously evil spin on dataclasses. It's tiny and the resulting classes import about 15-20 faster than dataclasses.
I had a long-running process and I wanted to check that it was at least doing something . I know its PID (32425 in this case) - here's how to use to see what it's doing right now.
Here's a devious trick for listing ALL columns in a SQLite database, using a SQL query that generates another SQL query.
I wanted to say "output this transformed value if it's not null, otherwise nothing". The recipe I figured out was: Full query example: This uses datasette-rure for the function.
For my git-history live demos I needed to store quite large files ( 200MB SQLite databases) in between GitHub Actions runs, to avoid having to recreate the entire file from scratch every time.
I figured out a pattern for doing this today using the CLI tool - given two SQLite databases in the current folder, called and : I'm using that in this GitHub Actions workflow.
Today I discovered codespell via this Rich commit. is a really simple spell checker that can be run locally or incorporated into a CI flow. codespell is designed to run against source code.
I needed to build and use many inhouse tools (like controlling my lights, checking doors cameras remotely, checking my server's temperature, etc).
I came up with a really useful prompt for GPT-4 today. I was considering options for refactoring how Datasette's core view functions work, and was contemplating alternative ways to dispatch to…