Simon Willison: all TILs

quarto

• Trying out Quarto on macOS - 2022-08-18

sqlite

• Sort by number of JSON intersections - 2022-08-17
• Trying out SQLite extensions on macOS - 2022-08-03
• Related content with SQLite FTS and a Datasette template function - 2022-07-31
• One-liner for running queries against CSV files with SQLite - 2022-06-20
• Counting SQLite virtual machine operations - 2022-03-20
• The simplest recursive CTE - 2022-03-20
• Combining substr and instr to extract text - 2022-02-15
• Ordered group_concat() in SQLite - 2022-02-06
• json_extract() path syntax in SQLite - 2022-01-18
• Track timestamped changes to a SQLite table using triggers - 2021-08-19
• Building a specific version of SQLite with pysqlite on macOS/Linux - 2021-08-14
• SQLite aggregate filter clauses - 2021-08-04
• Importing CSV data into SQLite with .import - 2021-07-13
• Using pysqlite3 on macOS - 2021-07-10
• Querying for items stored in UTC that were created on a Thursday in PST - 2021-03-12
• Splitting on commas in SQLite - 2021-02-01
• Fixing broken text encodings with sqlite-transform and ftfy - 2021-01-18
• Identifying column combination patterns in a SQLite table - 2021-01-12
• Replicating SQLite with rqlite - 2020-12-28
• Figuring out if a text value in SQLite is a valid integer or float - 2020-09-27
• Compiling the SQLite spellfix.c module on macOS - 2020-09-19
• Enabling WAL mode for SQLite database files - 2020-08-09
• SQLite BLOB literals - 2020-07-29
• Using LD_PRELOAD to run any version of SQLite with Python - 2020-06-17
• List all columns in a SQLite database - 2020-05-06
• Compile a new sqlite3 binary on Ubuntu - 2020-04-30
• Null case comparisons in SQLite - 2020-04-21
• Lag window function in SQLite - 2020-04-19

googlecloud

• Analyzing Google Cloud spend with Datasette - 2022-08-16
• Recursively fetching metadata for all files in a Google Drive folder - 2022-02-16
• Google OAuth for a CLI application - 2022-02-16
• Publishing to a public Google Cloud bucket with gsutil - 2021-09-20

python

• Defining setup.py dependencies using a URL - 2022-08-13
• struct endianness in Python - 2022-07-28
• Freezing requirements with pip-tools - 2022-07-14
• Efficiently copying a file - 2022-05-13
• Generating a calendar week grid with the Python Calendar module - 2022-03-31
• Streaming indented output of a JSON array - 2022-01-17
• Annotated explanation of David Beazley's dataklasses - 2021-12-19
• Safely outputting JSON - 2021-12-17
• Using C_INCLUDE_PATH to install Python packages - 2021-12-09
• __init_subclass__ - 2021-12-03
• Ignoring a line in both flake8 and mypy - 2021-11-30
• Using cog to update --help in a Markdown README file - 2021-11-18
• Planning parallel downloads with TopologicalSorter - 2021-11-16
• Using the sqlite3 Python module in Pyodide - Python WebAssembly - 2021-10-18
• Using Fabric with an SSH public key - 2021-10-06
• Find local variables in the traceback for an exception - 2021-08-09
• Check spelling using codespell - 2021-08-03
• Tracing every executed Python statement - 2021-03-21
• Using io.BufferedReader to peek against a non-peekable stream - 2021-02-15
• Handling CSV files with wide columns in Python - 2021-02-15
• Packaging a Python app as a standalone binary with PyInstaller - 2021-01-04
• Relinquishing control in Python asyncio - 2020-12-29
• Controlling the style of dumped YAML using PyYAML - 2020-12-07
• Running Python code in a subprocess with a time limit - 2020-12-06
• Decorators with optional arguments - 2020-10-28
• Explicit file encodings using click.File - 2020-10-16
• Understanding option names in Click - 2020-09-22
• Debugging a Click application using pdb - 2020-09-03
• Outputting JSON with reduced floating point precision - 2020-08-21
• How to call pip programatically from Python - 2020-08-11
• Password hashing in Python with pbkdf2 - 2020-07-13
• Introspecting Python function parameters - 2020-05-27
• Build the official Python documentation locally - 2020-05-08
• Use setup.py to install platform-specific dependencies - 2020-05-05
• Installing and upgrading Datasette plugins with pipx - 2020-05-04
• Generated a summary of nested JSON data - 2020-04-28
• macOS Catalina sort-of includes Python 3 - 2020-04-21
• Convert a datetime object to UTC without using pytz - 2020-04-19

javascript

• Creating a tiled zoomable image with OpenSeadragon and vips - 2022-08-12
• JavaScript date objects - 2022-01-16
• Using Tesseract.js to OCR every image on a page - 2021-11-09
• Loading lit from Skypack - 2021-09-21
• Preventing double form submissions with JavaScript - 2021-07-08
• Scroll page to form if there are errors - 2021-05-08
• Using Jest without a package.json - 2020-12-30
• Dropdown menu with details summary - 2020-10-31
• Writing JavaScript that responds to media queries - 2020-10-21
• Manipulating query strings with URLSearchParams - 2020-10-04
• Minifying JavaScript with npx uglify-js - 2020-08-30
• Dynamically loading multiple assets with a callback - 2020-08-21
• Working around the size limit for nodeValue in the DOM - 2020-08-21
• Implementing a "copy to clipboard" button - 2020-07-23

gpt3

• Using GPT-3 to figure out jq recipes - 2022-08-10

pytest

• Mocking a Textract LimitExceededException with boto - 2022-08-07
• Using pytest and Playwright to test a JavaScript web application - 2022-07-24
• Treating warnings as errors in pytest - 2022-04-01
• Async fixtures with pytest-asyncio - 2022-03-19
• pytest coverage with context - 2022-03-04
• Opt-in integration tests with pytest --integration - 2022-01-26
• Testing a Click app with streaming input - 2022-01-09
• Writing pytest tests against tools written with argparse - 2022-01-08
• Quick and dirty mock testing with mock_calls - 2021-11-02
• Using VCR and pytest with pytest-recording - 2021-11-02
• Start a server in a subprocess during a pytest session - 2020-08-31
• Code coverage using pytest and codecov.io - 2020-08-15
• Registering temporary pluggy plugins inside tests - 2020-07-21
• Asserting a dictionary is a subset of another dictionary - 2020-05-28
• How to mock httpx using pytest-mock - 2020-04-29
• Session-scoped temporary directories in pytest - 2020-04-26

aws

• Using boto3 from the command line - 2022-08-02
• Running OCR against a PDF file with AWS Textract - 2022-06-28
• Helper function for pagination using AWS boto3 - 2022-01-19
• Adding a CORS policy to an S3 bucket - 2022-01-04
• Recovering data from AWS Lightsail using EC2 - 2021-01-16
• Display EC2 instance costs per month - 2020-09-06

docker

• Emulating a big-endian s390x with QEMU - 2022-07-29
• Testing things in Fedora using Docker - 2022-07-27
• Allowing a container in Docker Desktop for Mac to talk to a PostgreSQL server on the host machine - 2022-03-31
• Docker Compose for Django development - 2021-05-24
• Installing packages from Debian unstable in a Docker image based on stable - 2021-03-22
• Running gdb against a Python process in a running Docker container - 2021-03-21
• Attaching a bash shell to a running Docker container - 2020-08-10

github

• Migrating a GitHub wiki from one repository to another - 2022-07-28
• Reporting bugs in GitHub to GitHub - 2022-07-07
• Setting up a custom subdomain for a GitHub Pages site - 2022-05-04
• Configuring Dependabot for a Python project with dependencies in setup.py - 2022-01-14
• Transferring a GitHub issue from a private to a public repository - 2021-12-22
• Syntax highlighting Python console examples with GFM - 2021-01-18
• Bulk fetching repository details with the GitHub GraphQL API - 2021-01-17
• Searching for repositories by topic using the GitHub GraphQL API - 2020-10-09
• Paginating through the GitHub GraphQL API with Python - 2020-07-09
• Accessing repository dependencies in the GitHub GraphQL API - 2020-04-30

fly

• Deploying a redbean app to Fly - 2022-07-24
• Wildcard DNS and SSL on Fly - 2022-05-25
• Writing Fly logs to S3 - 2022-05-25
• Using the Fly Docker registry - 2022-05-21
• Using the undocumented Fly GraphQL API - 2022-01-21
• Assigning a custom subdomain to a Fly app - 2021-11-20

electron

• Testing Electron apps with Playwright and GitHub Actions - 2022-07-13
• Configuring auto-update for an Electron app - 2021-09-13
• Bundling Python inside an Electron app - 2021-09-08
• Signing and notarizing an Electron app for distribution using GitHub Actions - 2021-09-08
• Open external links in an Electron app using the system browser - 2021-09-02
• Using the Chrome DevTools console as a REPL for an Electron app - 2021-08-31

npm

• Upgrading packages with npm - 2022-07-13
• Annotated package.json for idb-keyval - 2022-02-10
• Publishing a Web Component to npm - 2021-11-28

github-actions

• Conditionally running a second job in a GitHub Actions workflow - 2022-07-11
• Optimizing PNGs in GitHub Actions using Oxipng - 2022-05-18
• GitHub Actions job summaries - 2022-05-17
• Deploying a live Datasette demo when the tests pass - 2022-03-27
• Using the GitHub Actions cache with npx and no package.json - 2022-03-22
• Testing against Python 3.11 preview using GitHub Actions - 2022-02-02
• Storing files in an S3 bucket between GitHub Actions runs - 2021-12-07
• Attaching a generated file to a GitHub release using Actions - 2021-09-07
• Installing different PostgreSQL server versions in GitHub Actions - 2021-07-05
• Running tests against PostgreSQL in a service container - 2021-02-23
• Using Prettier to check JavaScript code style in GitHub Actions - 2020-12-31
• Talking to a PostgreSQL service container from inside a Docker container - 2020-09-18
• Open a debugging shell in GitHub Actions with tmate - 2020-09-14
• Skipping a GitHub Actions step without failing - 2020-08-22
• Using grep to write tests in CI - 2020-08-19
• Updating a Markdown table of contents with a GitHub Action - 2020-07-22
• Running different steps on a schedule - 2020-04-20
• Commit a file if it changed - 2020-04-19
• Set environment variables for all steps in a GitHub Action - 2020-04-19
• Dump out all GitHub Actions context - 2020-04-19
• Only run GitHub Action on push to master / main - 2020-04-19

zsh

• Passing command arguments using heredoc syntax - 2022-07-07
• Customizing my zsh prompt - 2020-08-12

bash

• Ignoring errors in a section of a Bash script - 2022-06-27
• Using awk to add a prefix - 2022-04-08
• nullglob in bash - 2022-02-14
• Finding CSV files that start with a BOM using ripgrep - 2021-05-28
• Skipping CSV rows with odd numbers of quotes using ripgrep - 2020-12-11
• Escaping a SQL query to use with curl and Datasette - 2020-12-08
• Escaping strings in Bash using !:q - 2020-10-01
• Looping over comma-separated values in Bash - 2020-09-01

datasette

• Registering new Datasette plugin hooks by defining them in other plugins - 2022-06-17
• Crawling Datasette with Datasette - 2022-02-27
• Reusing an existing Click tool with register_commands - 2021-11-29
• Searching all columns of a table in Datasette - 2021-08-23
• Running Datasette on Replit - 2021-05-02
• Querying for GitHub issues open for less than 60 seconds - 2021-03-12
• Serving MBTiles with datasette-media - 2021-02-03
• Redirects for Datasette - 2020-11-25

linux

• Using iconv to convert the text encoding of a file - 2022-06-14
• Enabling a user to execute a specific command as root without a password - 2022-02-13
• Basic strace to see what a process is doing - 2020-09-07
• Piping echo to a file owned by root using sudo and tee - 2020-08-24

jinja

• Formatting thousands in Jinja - 2022-06-08
• Turning on Jinja autoescaping when using Template() directly - 2020-09-18

networking

• Making HTTP calls using IPv6 - 2022-06-08

django

• Using just with Django - 2022-06-06
• Django data migration using a PostgreSQL CTE - 2021-05-17
• Enabling a gin index for faster LIKE queries - 2021-05-16
• migrations.RunSQL.noop for reversible SQL migrations - 2021-05-02
• Django Admin action for exporting selected rows as CSV - 2021-04-25
• Filter by comma-separated values in the Django admin - 2021-04-21
• Usable horizontal scrollbars in the Django admin for mouse users - 2021-04-20
• Enabling the fuzzystrmatch extension in PostgreSQL with a Django migration - 2021-04-18
• Efficient bulk deletions in Django - 2021-04-09
• How to almost get facet counts in the Django admin - 2021-03-11
• Pretty-printing all read-only JSON in the Django admin - 2021-03-07
• Show the timezone for datetimes in the Django admin - 2021-03-02
• Writing tests for the Django admin with pytest-django - 2021-03-02
• Adding extra read-only information to a Django admin change page - 2021-02-25
• PostgreSQL full-text search in the Django Admin - 2020-07-25

service-workers

• Intercepting fetch in a service worker - 2022-04-30

macos

• Atuin for zsh shell history in SQLite - 2022-04-26
• Seeing files opened by a process using opensnoop - 2022-04-26
• Trick Apple Photos into letting you access your video files - 2022-04-12
• Installing Python on macOS with the official Python installer - 2022-02-28
• Using lsof on macOS - 2021-12-11
• Running Docker on an M1 Mac - 2021-05-25
• Shrinking PNG files with pngquant and oxipng - 2021-02-07
• Finding the largest SQLite files on a Mac - 2020-08-19
• Fixing "compinit: insecure directories" error - 2020-04-26
• Close terminal window on Ctrl+D for macOS - 2020-04-21
• Get Skitch working on Catalina - 2020-04-21
• Running pip install -e .[test] in zsh on macOS Catalina - 2020-04-21

sphinx

• Format code examples in documentation with blacken-docs - 2022-04-24
• Adding Sphinx autodoc to a project, and configuring Read The Docs to build it - 2021-08-10
• Using sphinx.ext.extlinks for issue links - 2021-02-17

twitter

• How to get credentials for a new Twitter bot - 2022-04-17
• Exporting and editing a Twitter Spaces recording - 2022-03-23

spatialite

• GUnion to combine geometries in SpatiaLite - 2022-04-12
• Creating a minimal SpatiaLite database with Python - 2021-12-17
• KNN queries with SpatiaLite - 2021-05-16

auth0

• Logging users out of Auth0 - 2022-04-03
• Simplest possible OAuth authentication with Auth0 - 2022-03-26

webassembly

• Compiling to WASM with llvm on macOS - 2022-03-28

shot-scraper

• Extracting web page content using Readability.js and shot-scraper - 2022-03-24

git

• Rewriting a repo to contain the history of just specific files - 2022-03-22
• Removing a git commit and force pushing to remove it from history - 2021-10-22

google-sheets

• Concatenating strings and newlines in Google Sheets - 2022-03-15

gis

• Natural Earth in SpatiaLite and Datasette - 2022-03-04
• Downloading MapZen elevation tiles - 2021-02-04

homebrew

• Running the latest SQLite in Datasette using Homebrew - 2022-02-28
• Running a MySQL server using Homebrew - 2021-06-11
• Upgrading Python Homebrew packages using pip - 2020-10-14
• Browsing your local git checkout of homebrew-core - 2020-08-27
• Packaging a Python CLI tool for Homebrew - 2020-08-11

graphql

• Using curl to run GraphQL queries from the command line - 2022-02-21
• get-graphql-schema - 2022-02-01

readthedocs

• Linking from /latest/ to /stable/ on Read The Docs - 2022-01-20
• Promoting the stable version of the documentation using rel=canonical - 2022-01-20
• Using custom Sphinx templates on Read the Docs - 2020-12-07
• Read the Docs Search API - 2020-08-16
• Pointing a custom subdomain at Read the Docs - 2020-08-14

pixelmator

• Pixel editing a favicon with Pixelmator - 2022-01-20

webauthn

• WebAuthn browser support - 2021-12-29

kubernetes

• kubectl proxy - 2021-12-28
• Basic Datasette in Kubernetes - 2021-11-05

cloudflare

• Adding a robots.txt using Cloudflare workers - 2021-12-21

pluggy

• Registering the same Pluggy hook multiple times in a single file - 2021-12-16

caddy

• Pausing traffic and retrying in Caddy - 2021-11-24

cloudrun

• Using build-arg variables with Cloud Run deployments - 2021-11-19
• Tailing Google Cloud Run request logs and importing them into SQLite - 2021-08-09
• Increasing the time limit for a Google Cloud Scheduler task - 2021-07-08
• Switching between gcloud accounts - 2021-05-18
• Listing files uploaded to Cloud Build - 2021-04-14
• Using the gcloud run services list command - 2020-09-01
• How to deploy a folder with a Dockerfile to Cloud Run - 2020-08-04
• Use labels on Cloud Run services for a billing breakdown - 2020-04-21

deno

• Annotated code for a demo of WebSocket chat in Deno Deploy - 2021-11-06

web-components

• Understanding Kristofer Joseph's Single File Web Component - 2021-10-27

sql

• Cumulative total over time in SQL - 2021-09-13
• Building a Markdown summary of Django group permissions - 2021-06-03
• Finding duplicate records by matching name and nearby distance - 2021-05-19

purpleair

• Calculating the AQI based on the Purple Air API for a sensor - 2021-08-31

observable-plot

• Histogram with tooltips in Observable Plot - 2021-08-21

imagemagick

• Compressing an animated GIF with gifsicle or ImageMagick mogrify - 2021-08-05
• Set a GIF to loop using ImageMagick - 2021-08-03

vscode

• Search and replace with regular expressions in VS Code - 2021-08-02
• Language-specific indentation settings in VS Code - 2021-04-04

jq

• Extracting objects recursively with jq - 2021-07-24
• Turning an array of arrays into objects with jq - 2021-05-25
• Converting no-decimal-point latitudes and longitudes using jq - 2021-03-11
• Flattening nested JSON objects with jq - 2021-03-11
• Loading radio.garden into SQLite using jq - 2021-02-17
• Converting Airtable JSON for use with sqlite-utils using jq - 2020-08-28

tesseract

• Using the tesseract CLI tool - 2021-07-18

nginx

• Using nginx to proxy to a Unix domain socket - 2021-07-10

reddit

• Scraping Reddit via their JSON API - 2021-06-21

vim

• Mouse support in vim - 2021-06-19

amplitude

• Exporting Amplitude events to SQLite - 2021-06-06

vega

• Vega-Lite bar charts in the same order as the data - 2021-05-15

wikipedia

• The Wikipedia page stats API - 2021-05-13

postgresql

• Constructing GeoJSON in PostgreSQL - 2021-04-24
• Using json_extract_path in PostgreSQL - 2021-04-13
• Using unnest() to use a comma-separated string as the input to an IN query - 2021-04-10
• Closest locations to a point - 2021-03-22
• Granting a PostgreSQL user read-only access to some tables - 2021-02-26
• Show the SQL schema for a PostgreSQL database - 2021-02-23

markdown

• Useful Markdown extensions in Python - 2021-04-03
• Rendering Markdown with the GitHub Markdown API - 2020-08-22
• Converting HTML and rich-text to Markdown - 2020-05-09

azure

• Writing an Azure Function that serves all traffic to a subdomain - 2021-03-27

zeit-now

• Redirecting all paths on a Vercel instance - 2021-03-27
• Running a Python ASGI app on Vercel - 2020-04-19

mediawiki

• How to run MediaWiki with SQLite on a macOS laptop - 2021-03-06

cookiecutter

• Conditionally creating directories in cookiecutter - 2021-01-27
• Testing cookiecutter templates with pytest - 2021-01-27

jupyter

• Embedding JavaScript in a Jupyter notebook - 2021-01-22

digitalocean

• Running Datasette on DigitalOcean App Platform - 2020-10-06

selenium

• Using async/await in JavaScript in Selenium - 2020-10-02
• Installing Selenium for Python on macOS with ChromeDriver - 2020-10-02

typescript

• Very basic tsc usage - 2020-09-06

svg

• Creating a dynamic line chart with SVG - 2020-08-22

ics

• Providing a "subscribe in Google Calendar" link for an ics feed - 2020-08-21

heroku

• Programatically accessing Heroku PostgreSQL from GitHub Actions - 2020-08-18
• Upgrading a Heroku PostgreSQL database with pg:copy - 2020-07-20
• Using heroku pg:pull to restore a backup to a macOS laptop - 2020-07-10

asgi

• Writing tests for the ASGI lifespan protocol with HTTPX - 2020-06-29

pypi

• Adding project links to PyPI - 2020-05-11

firefox

• Search across all loaded resources in Firefox - 2020-05-05

node

• Constant-time comparison of strings in Node - 2020-05-01

tailscale

• Restricting SSH connections to devices within a Tailscale network - 2020-04-23

presenting

• Using macOS stickies to display a workshop link on the screen - 2020-04-20