Damian’s notes

Django SQL Dashboard provides an authenticated interface for executing read-only SQL queries directly against your PostgreSQL database, allowing exploration and visualization of your data with minimal friction. Queries can be bookmarked and turned in to publish dashboards.

One of my bugbears is user databases that assume or impose first-name, surname fields, based on assumptions about how people's names are structured. This W3C note on personal names around the world outlines some of the ways names are understood around the world, and has suggestions for designing UIs accordingly.

Entertaining twitter thread on a bug (that wasn't a bug really) caused by changing keyboard-layout conventions and the accommodations made to support old keyboards on new computers.

Access-control lists are often set up to answer the obvious question "can X access Y to do Z?" but not other useful things like "What are all the Ys X can do Z to?" But this needs to be planned in from the start, or you will be sad later on.
(Twitter thread.)

We are used to treating databases as a pluggable back-end for storing inert data for processing in our code, but the PostgreSQL database has many features for slicing and dicing the data and doing analysis than one might think.

A simple, correct PEP517 package builder—in other words a replacement for disttools/setuputils/whatever.

PEP 517: A build-system-independent format for source trees. This is an attempt to do for Python packaging what WSGI did for web frameworks: create a framework in to which appropriately simple or complex guild systems can be plugged.

Checklist for programmers working on almost any web site that processes peoples’ names, even if it is just in the login & profile sections. The upshot of this is most of the clever ideas you might have for parsing and making deductions from a person’s name are probably not generally useful and should not be attempted!

Naming authors, and processing people names in general, is a tricky subject. Here is a note on just some of the variability an internationalized application that handles names must take in to account.