A comprehensive guide to building a secure DNS sinkhole using CoreDNS and Smallstep certificates, providing DNS-level blocking and serving custom HTTPS block pages.

Today I learned how to install tools from GitHub that are written in Go, using [github.com/icholy/semgrepx](https://github.com/icholy/semgrepx) as ...

I came up with this trick today, when I wanted to run a `LIKE` search against every column in a table.

`pip` uses a cache to avoid downloading packages again:

Today I built a system for monitoring Reddit for new posts that link to various domains that I own.

I figured out how to run a subprocess with a time limit for [datasette-ripgrep](https://github.com/simonw/datasette-ripgrep), using the `asyncio.cr...

Via https://alexgarcia.xyz/dataflow/examples/wiki-pageviews/ I found this API for retrieving daily pageview stats from Wikipedia for any article:

A comprehensive guide to implementing automated API status monitoring for Tomcat applications using Bash scripting, with detailed explanations of script components, error handling, and best practices.

I wanted to start an actual server process, run it for the duration of my pytest session and shut it down at the end.

[redbean](https://redbean.dev/) is a fascinating project - it provides a web server in a self-contained executable which you can add assets (or dyn...

A few years ago I decided to learn how to make some classic cocktails. It is a very rewarding hobby.

I usually build command-line tools using [Click](https://click.palletsprojects.com/) (and my [click-app](https://github.com/simonw/click-app) cooki...

I wanted a mechanism to check if a given Python object was "callable" - could be called like a function - or "async callable" - could be called usi...

My [lazy approach to writing unit tests](https://simonwillison.net/2020/Feb/11/cheating-at-unit-tests-pytest-black/) means that sometimes I want to...

I wanted to send out a small batch of follow-up emails for workshop attendees today, and I realized that since I have their emails in a database ta...

A few notes on JavaScript `Date` object, based on trying to do some basic things with them in Observable notebooks.

I decided to try out [Quarto](https://quarto.org/), the new notebook/markdown/publishing system built on Pandoc.

[Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/) displays comments in a tree. This can be frustrating if you want to keep track of a particular convers...

A comprehensive guide to implementing Google Authenticator two-factor authentication for SSH and sudo access on Linux systems, including troubleshooting and best practices.

A comprehensive guide to managing private forks of public repositories, including maintaining upstream synchronization, handling visibility changes, and implementing best practices for enterprise environments.

Several of the [SQLite JSON functions](), such as `json_extract()` and `json_array_length()`, take a path argument. This uses custom syntax along t...

For [Datasette #1249](https://github.com/simonw/datasette/issues/1249) I wanted to build a Docker image from the `python:3.9.2-slim-buster` base im...

I habitually use the `tmpdir` fixture in pytest to get a temporary directory that will be cleaned up after each test, but that doesn't work with `s...

There's a story going around at the moment that people have found code from their private GitHub repositories in the AI training data known as The ...