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Storing files in an S3 bucket between GitHub Actions runs

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.

Local wildcard DNS on macOS with dnsmasq

I wanted to get wildcard DNS running on my Mac laptop, for development purposes. I wanted to point to my localhost IP address. I figured out how to do this using , installed via Homebrew.

Using json_extract_path in PostgreSQL

The function in PostgreSQL can be used to extract specific items from JSON - but I couldn't find documentation for the path language it uses.

Upgrading Python Homebrew packages using pip

VisiData 2.0 came out today. I previously installed VisiData using Homebrew, but the VisiData tap has not yet been updated with the latest version.

Using the GitHub Actions cache with npx and no package.json

Some of my repositories have GitHub Actions workflows that execute commands using , for example my graphql-scraper repo using to install and run the tool: npx get-graphql-schema…

Returning related rows in a single SQL query using JSON

When building database-backed applications you'll often find yourself wanting to return a row from the database along with its related rows.

Mouse support in vim

Today I learned that if you hit in vim and then type and hit enter… vim grows mouse support! In your terminal!

Pixel editing a favicon with Pixelmator

I wanted to add a favicon to Datasette, using a PNG image served from as suggested in this article by Adam Johnson.

Logging OpenAI API requests and responses using HTTPX

My LLM tool has a feature where you can set a environment variable to see full debug level details of any HTTP requests it makes to the OpenAI APIs.

Testing Electron apps with Playwright and GitHub Actions

Yesterday I figured out (issue 133) how to use Playwright to run tests against my Electron app, and then execute those tests in CI using GitHub Actions, for my datasett-app repo for my Datasette…

shot-scraper for a subset of table columns

For Datasette issue 1844 I wanted to create the following screenshot: From this page: https://congress-legislators.datasettes.com/legislators/legislator terms?

Opt-in integration tests with pytest --integration

For both s3-credentials and datasette-publish-fly I have a need for real-world integration tests that actually interact with the underlying APIs (AWS or Fly) to create and destroy resources on those…

Using ChatGPT Browse to name a Python package

I needed a name for my new Python CLI tool. It was originally called because I checked and https://pypi.org/project/py-grep/ was available - but when I tried to push the package to PyPI I got an error…

Rendering Markdown with the GitHub Markdown API

I wanted to convert the Markdown used in my TILs to HTML, using the exact same configuration as GitHub does.

Redirecting a domain using Cloudflare Pages

I wanted to redirect https://global-power-plants.datasettes.com/ to https://datasette.io/ - I decided to spin up a Cloudflare Pages site to do the work.

Trying out cr-sqlite on macOS

cr-sqlite is fascinating. It's a loadable SQLite extension by Matt Wonlaw that "allows merging different SQLite databases together that have taken independent writes".

Setting up a custom subdomain for a GitHub Pages site

This is so much easier than I was expecting it to be. https://simonw.github.io/datasette-lite/ Shortly after launching I realized that the project deserved its own vanity subdomain.

Scraping Reddit via their JSON API

Reddit have long had an unofficial (I think) API where you can add to the end of any URL to get back the data for that page as JSON. I wanted to track new posts on Reddit that mention my domain .

Optimizing PNGs in GitHub Actions using Oxipng

My datasette-screenshots repository generates screenshots of Datasette using my shot-scraper tool, for people who need them for articles or similar.

Using LD_PRELOAD to run any version of SQLite with Python

I've been wanting to figure this out for ages. This thread on Hacker News plus this Stackoverflow post gave me some initial clues.