Farshid/Ashouri

Notes on software engineering

Archive / page 8

141–160 of 550 posts, newest first.

  1. 2025

  2. Learn Data Engineering topics using Flash Cards

    Flash cards are amazing way to learn advanced topics. Spaced repetition techniques are quite powerful and play well with how our brains work.

    flash-cards data-engineering iceberg trino
    1 min read

  3. Syncing slide images and audio in iMovie

    I found an MP3 recording of an old talk I gave and decided to use the slides from that talk to create a video using iMovie.

    TIL macos
    1 min read

  4. Using cog to update --help in a Markdown README file

    My csvs-to-sqlite README includes a section that shows the output of the command (relevant issue). I had been manually copying this in, but I decided to try using cog to automate the process.

    TIL python
    1 min read

  5. Convert git log output to JSON using jq

    I just spent way too long messing around with ChatGPT (transcript here) trying to figure this out. After much iteration, here's a recipe that works (mostly written by me at this point): The output…

    git jq cli json bash
    1 min read

  6. Using sphinx.ext.extlinks for issue links

    Datasette's release notes are formatted using Sphinx. Almost every bullet point links to the corresponding GitHub issue, so they were full of lines that look like this: I noticed that the aspw…

    TIL sphinx
    1 min read

  7. Debugging a Click application using pdb

    This tip is for when you are working on a Python command-line application that runs using that program's name, as opposed to typing .

    python debugging cli click pdb
    1 min read

  8. Wider tooltip areas for Observable Plot

    In this Observable notebook I'm plotting a line on a chart, but I want to provide tooltips showing the exact value at any point on the line.

    TIL observable-plot
    1 min read

  9. Trying out SQLite extensions on macOS

    Alex Garcia has been building some really cool new custom extensions for SQLite, working in C and Go. So far he's released two: - sqlite-lines, written in C, which adds and table-valued functions, for…

    TIL sqlite
    2 min read

  10. Outputting JSON with reduced floating point precision

    datasette-leaflet-geojson outputs GeoJSON geometries in HTML pages in a way that can be picked up by JavaScript and used to plot a Leaflet map.

    TIL python
    1 min read

  11. Publishing a Docker container for Microsoft Edit to the GitHub Container Registry

    Microsoft recently released Edit, a new terminal text editor written in Rust. It's pretty nice - it's reminiscent of but with a retro MS DOS feel. I wanted to run it on my Apple Silicon Mac.

    TIL github
    2 min read

  12. Wildcard DNS and SSL on Fly

    Fly makes it surprisingly easy to configure wildcard DNS, such that is served by a single Fly application (which can include multiple instances in multiple regions with global load-balancing).

    TIL fly
    2 min read

  13. Ensure labels exist in a GitHub repository

    I wanted to ensure that when this template repository was used to create a new repo that repo would have a specific set of labels.

    github github-actions automation labels ci/cd
    1 min read

  14. Running OCR against a PDF file with AWS Textract

    Textract is the AWS OCR API. It's very good - I've fed it hand-written notes from the 1890s and it read them better than I could.

    TIL aws
    2 min read

  15. Geocoding from Python on macOS using pyobjc-framework-CoreLocation

    Rhet Turnbull shared this short script for looking up the named timezone for a given location from Python on macOS using and the framework. It uses the package and pyobjc-framework-CoreLocation.

    python macos geocoding core-location pyobjc
    1 min read

  16. Using DuckDB in Python to access Parquet data

    Did a quick experiment with DuckDB today, inspired by the bmschmidt/hathi-binary repo. That repo includes 3GB of data in 68 parquet files. Those files are 45MB each.

    TIL duckdb
    1 min read

  17. Combined release notes from GitHub with jq and paginate-json

    Matt Holt asked: Is there a tool that uses the GitHub API to generate a doc with all release notes from a repo?

    github api release-notes jq cli
    2 min read

  18. Conditionally creating directories in cookiecutter

    I wanted my datasette-plugin cookiecutter template to create empty and directories if the user replied to the and prompts.

    cookiecutter python templating automation project-generation
    1 min read

  19. Using VCR and pytest with pytest-recording

    pytest-recording is a neat pytest plugin that makes it easy to use the VCR library, which helps write tests against HTTP resources by automatically capturing responses and baking them into a YAML file…

    TIL pytest
    1 min read

  20. Installing flash-attn without compiling it

    If you ever run into instructions that tell you to do this: Do not try to do this . It is a trap. For some reason attempting to install this runs a compilation process which can take multiple hours .

    TIL python
    1 min read

  21. Tech Blogs and Podcasts

    TIL: ================= - Today I Learnt, by David Winterbottom - Sam Searles-Bryant - Federico Marani - Josh Branchaud - Simon Willison - Jake Worth - Hashrocket - Thoughtbot

    blog good-read reads tech
    1 min read