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I got curious about how git knows what a Python function / class definition looks like when displaying diffs. Turns out it ships with a giant ball of regular expressions covering 22 different languages, in github.com/git/git/blob/m… Screenshot of a git diff where it highlighted the Python claScreenshot of the python regular expressions from userdiff.c
Here's where they added support for Python "async def" functions seven months ago. The way to conquer terrifying regular expressions is with neat, comprehensive unit tests: github.com/git/git/commit…
I like that those unit tests are accompanied by a README explaining how to write them: github.com/git/git/blob/0…
Here's that regex visualized: debuggex.com/r/oz1Ofu7m-QDm… (I love using debuggex for these)
For the record: I think regular expressions are exactly the right approach for git to be using here - definitely better than attempting to ship full parser implementations for 22 different languages!
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Simon Willison
@simonw
Hiring process for @AdHocTeam is really interesting: pick some assignments from homework.adhoc.team/assignments/ (depending on your role), your submissions are then anonymously reviewed by members of the team
The assignments are extremely well designed - here's one for testing JavaScript/API knowledge homework.adhoc.team/fetch/ - and here's one testing SRE skills building Docker containers and configuring nginx homework.adhoc.team/containerize/
They wrote about why they do this here: it's to allow them to hire for their remote-first team without needing to conduct in-person technical interviews adhocteam.us/2018/02/26/why…
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Simon Willison
@simonw
@zzxiv @andrewparker @datasetteproj That was one of my first use-cases for twitter-to-sqlite! I have it running on a cron every ten minutes that fetches the most recent 50 tweets that I've favourited

*/10 * * * * run-one twitter-to-sqlite favorites /home/simon/twitter.db -a /home/simon/auth.json --stop_after=50
@zzxiv @andrewparker @datasetteproj Then I can use Datasette to search my favorites - I have 23,993 favorited tweets in the index now
@zzxiv @andrewparker @datasetteproj I'm not yet fetching the content of the linked articles, but I've thought about doing that - I could have a separate DB table with URLs and article contents which is also setup for full-text search pretty easily
Read 5 tweets
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Simon Willison
@simonw
SQL is a better API language than GraphQL. Convince me otherwise!
To counter some obvious arguments...

You don't have to expose your entire schema, instead expose carefully designed SQL views (so you can refactor your tables without breaking your API)

Read-only, obviously!

Use time limits to cut off expensive queries (GraphQL needs this too)
(I haven't quite convinced myself yet that SQL is a great language for update APIs, but I'm working on it)
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