Datasette is such a neat project & tool. Simon, its developer, has built an entire ecosystem of tools around sqlite [1], Datasette [2], and automation through GH Actions, like git-scraping [3]. Also, he has been actively blogging for 20+ years [4]. I particularly enjoy his short TIL posts [5].
Simon also did some brilliant stuff with Datasette based on a 2-hour long mp3 of train announcements that ScotRail released as part of a Freedom of Information reponse. A journalist called Jon Brady found it initially on the ScotRail website and tweeted about it, I chopped it up into individual announcements and crowdsourced the transcription, and Simon built a dashboard to explore them all in Datasette.
If you have a spare 17 minutes, this great, informative video by Wendover Productions [1] goes more in-depth about the various problems with Lithium-ion batteries.
They way he is able to explain complex subjects by starting from first principles, gently adding more and more layers, with beautiful, custom-made figures and animations is truly, literally, awesome.
I strongly recommend supporting the author via his Patreon if you enjoy his blog posts.
These are amazing - from the design to the interactive demos to the writing. I think "digital monograph" is almost a more apt description than "blog post". I've written tons of blog posts and they have almost nothing in common with what he's doing. 8,000 well written words plus formatting and links plus 50 or so embedded demos is really an astounding amount of work. What I appreciate most is the use of the medium itself. Imagine if the standard format for academic papers was updated from the black and white two-column format used for a half century to something like this?
The article on mechanical watches had so much depth and such good explanations I thought he was a mechanical watch engineer or enthusiast who happened to also have web design, 3d animation, and writing skills
He does :) hope he doesn't mind me sharing from his Patreon:
> I myself don't even own any traditional watches, so the topic was very new to me. Thankfully, it was easy to understand the gist of how mechanical watches work just from watching some YouTube videos and I decided to give the topic a go.
If you subscribe -- you should subscribe!! -- you can read his "making of" posts which are also fascinating. I don't think he's a domain expert in anything he's written about, he just does a ton of research and only produces a few articles per year.
He has an commentary article on Patreon where he says he doesn't even own any traditional watches, and had to buy a movement to take apart and understand
This is how school must be. I'd rather pay people like him to create interactive content than pay the school to teach my kids useless material in dry, rigid ways.
[1] https://github.com/simonw?tab=repositories&q=sqlite&sort=sta...
[2] https://github.com/simonw?tab=repositories&q=datasette&sort=...
[3] https://simonwillison.net/2020/Oct/9/git-scraping/
[4] https://simonwillison.net/
[5] https://til.simonwillison.net/