Robuta

This week I got SpatiaLite 5 working in the Datasette Docker image, improved the CDC vaccination history git scraper, figured out Datasette on Azure and we...

The first week of work for 2025 was a strange one. In many ways I hit the ground running, getting on with some important items that I need to complete early on...

This week I completed the Software Carpentry instructor training course, added two foundational features to sqlite-utils and learned how to compile modules for...

This week was mostly about incremental improvements. And squirrels. The Squirrel Census Last October a team of 323 volunteer Squirrel Sighters got together to...

Despite distractions from AI I managed to make progress on a bunch of different projects this week, including new releases of s3-credentials and shot-scraper,...

What a terrible week. I’ve found it hard to concentrate on anything substantial. In a mostly futile attempt to distract myself from doomscrolling I’ve...

This week I started a limited production run of my new backend for Vaccinate CA calling, built a tableau-to-sqlite import tool and started working on a subset...

This week I built a geospatial search engine for protected areas in California, shipped datasette-graphql 1.0 and started working towards the next milestone...

I’ve mainly been working on Datasette Enrichments and continuing to explore the possibilities enabled by sqlite-chronicle. Enrichments This is the biggest...

and now for something completely different

Also no deep-sea diving allowed. After our family dinner last Saturday night, my wife said that she thought she had something in her eye that she couldn’t...

There was something about Monday. You could just feel it. I got to the office, checked my diary, and for the first time in months I saw a meeting-free...

Sunrise over the Mediterranean as seen on my morning run. Most of this week was spent in Barcelona at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo. It’s the third time...

I introduced datasette-secrets two weeks ago. The core idea is to provide a way for end-users to store secrets such as API keys in Datasette, allowing other...

A pretty regular week, with another couple of days in the office. On Wednesday I had another reminder of the ‘before times’ when the train turned up at the...

I spent this week in France, the first half in Bordeaux followed by a couple of days in Paris. Every year, the division of the company that I work for gives a...

Imagine opening a new office in New York City A double-helping of weeknotes. I spent the last two weeks in New York City, working with our team to open our new...

On Friday we headed town to Bournemouth to say goodbye to my nan. It was a beautiful and moving service, reminding us of what a lovely woman she was. My uncle...

My life is filled with so much music at the moment. In some ways it’s like being a teenager again. I seem to spend most of my spare cash on vinyl, CDs,...

On Friday VaccinateCA grew in scope, a lot: we launched a new website called Vaccinate The States. Patrick McKenzie wrote more about the project here—the...

I started publishing weeknotes in 2019 partly as a way to hold myself accountable but mainly as a way to encourage myself to write more. Now that I’m writing...

I gave a talk about Dogsheep at Noisebridge’s Five Minutes of Fame on Thursday. Just one problem: my regular Dogsheep demo was broken, so I ended up building...

A week of two halves, or more accurately one fifth and four-fifths. Monday was Human Rights Day in South Africa (reflecting the date of the Sharpeville...

This week I started experimenting with a desktop application version of Datasette—with the goal of providing people who aren’t comfortable with the...

This week I broke my streak of not sending out the Datasette newsletter, figured out how to use Sphinx for Python class documentation, worked out how to run...

A few small releases this week, for django-sql-dashboard, datasette-auth-passwords and datasette-publish-vercel. django-sql-dashboard widgets and permissions...

After starving myself for over twenty-four hours last week ahead of a colonoscopy, this week I once again found myself going without food for a whole day....

A regular week, back in the office after last week’s trip to Barcelona. Things have suddenly turned very cold here in the UK. It’s feeling dark and wintry....

Javelina Stadium at Texas A&M University–Kingsville. Photo: Katie Doran The family emotional rollercoaster continued through this week. Everything seemed...

The busiest, most stressful week I’ve had in a long time. On Sunday evening I flew to Barcelona to attend the annual Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo. I’d booked...

The principle theme for the past few weeks has been plugins. Llama 2 in LLM via plugins I added the ability to support models other than the OpenAI ones to …

On Tuesday my company had a party to celebrate both our 10th anniversary and the upcoming retirement of our CEO. Drinks and canapés were followed by a formal...

On my first day of trying to use Lime e-bikes, I bagged two that didn’t have a crank and pedal on one side. It was a comedy moment after I unlocked the first...

A view of Canary Wharf, over the river from Greenwich, on a cold Tuesday morning in March Four days in London followed by Friday at home. The main event of the...

I’ve been mostly shaving yaks this week—two in particular: the Datasette table refactor and the next release of git-history. I also built and released my...

My big project this week was s3-credentials, described yesterday—but I also put together a fun expermiental Datasette plugin bundling JupyterLite and wrote...

A productive, balanced and enjoyable week. This was a week in which I: Spent time reading through our business strategy documentation and trying to learn about...

Looks like we picked the wrong week to fly to a popper-fuelled party at Everest Base Camp. Two and a half years after it happened the first time, my wife...

My goal for this week was to unblock progress on Datasette by finally finishing the dash encoding implementation I described last week. I was getting close,...

This week I built a Datasette plugin that lets you query a database by drawing shapes on a map! datasette-leaflet-freedraw SpatiaLite is a SQLite extension...

Apr 14, 2025 - Jeff Bridgforth is a senior front-end developer looking for a new opportunity.

Dec 1, 2025 - Jeff Bridgforth is a senior front-end developer looking for a new opportunity.

Jan 7, 2023 - Jeff Bridgforth is a senior front-end developer looking for a new opportunity.

Without beating around the bush, the major event of this week was a colonoscopy. This year I decided to follow up with a couple of minor medical issues that...

Early on Sunday morning we had an incredible thunderstorm, with a lightning strike that fried the routers for a swathe of people in our street. It also killed...

Most of my week was spent at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Barcelona. This is a gigantic gathering of 6,500 Chief Information Officers and other IT...

I’ve been working with Alex Garcia on an experiment involving using Datasette to explore FEC contributions. We currently have a 11GB SQLite...

My diary was back-to-back this week, with very little discretionary time to get anything done. I’m going to have to do something about it to stop it from...

I’ve been having a bunch of fun taking advantage of CORS-enabled LLM APIs to build client-side JavaScript applications that access LLMs directly. I also span...

I’m still working on refactoring Datasette’s table view. In doing so I spun out a new plugin, datasette-pretty-traces, which improves Datasette’s tooling...

In addition to exploring the new MusicCaps training and evaluation data I’ve been working on the big Datasette JSON refactor, and getting excited about a...

In between blogging about ChatGPT rhetoric, micro-benchmarking with ChatGPT Code Interpreter and Why prompt injection is an even bigger problem now I managed...