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Link tags: database
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Design Systems Database: Surf among top‑notch Design Systems
A collection of collections, this is a directory of design systems, with the handy option to browse by component type. The blueprints section is still a bit thin on the ground, but likes the most useful bit—an in-depth dissection of individual compenent types.
Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Incident Database
The AI Incident Database is dedicated to indexing the collective history of harms or near harms realized in the real world by the deployment of artificial intelligence systems.
Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data
I like the way that Simon is liberating his data from silos and making it work for him.
‘Real’ Programming Is an Elitist Myth | WIRED
The title says it all, really. This is another great piece of writing from Paul Ford.
I’ve noticed that when software lets nonprogrammers do programmer things, it makes the programmers nervous. Suddenly they stop smiling indulgently and start talking about what “real programming” is. This has been the history of the World Wide Web, for example. Go ahead and tweet “HTML is real programming,” and watch programmers show up in your mentions to go, “As if.” Except when you write a web page in HTML, you are creating a data model that will be interpreted by the browser. This is what programming is.
SofaConf 2020 - a technical write-up | Trys Mudford
Trys describes the backend architecture of the excellent Sofa Conf website. In short, it’s a Jamstack dream: all of the convenience and familiarity of using a database-driven CMS (Craft), combined with all the speed and resilience of using a static site generator (Eleventy).
I love the fact that anyone on the Clearleft events team can push to production with a Slack message.
I also love that the site is Lighthousetastically fast.
Ways to think about machine learning — Benedict Evans
This strikes me as a sensible way of thinking about machine learning: it’s like when we got relational databases—suddenly we could do more, quicker, and easier …but it doesn’t require us to treat the technology like it’s magic.
An important parallel here is that though relational databases had economy of scale effects, there were limited network or ‘winner takes all’ effects. The database being used by company A doesn’t get better if company B buys the same database software from the same vendor: Safeway’s database doesn’t get better if Caterpillar buys the same one. Much the same actually applies to machine learning: machine learning is all about data, but data is highly specific to particular applications. More handwriting data will make a handwriting recognizer better, and more gas turbine data will make a system that predicts failures in gas turbines better, but the one doesn’t help with the other. Data isn’t fungible.
Let’s talk about usernames
This post goes into specifics on Django, but the broader points apply no matter what your tech stack. I’m relieved to find out that The Session is using the tripartite identity pattern (although Huffduffer, alas, isn’t):
What we really want in terms of identifying users is some combination of:
- System-level identifier, suitable for use as a target of foreign keys in our database
- Login identifier, suitable for use in performing a credential check
- Public identity, suitable for displaying to other users
Many systems ask the username to fulfill all three of these roles, which is probably wrong.
Approximate Text Search Made Easy
A step-by-step explanation by Henrik on how he implemented fuzzy search on his music site—something I could do on The Session. He even talks about expanding this to work with ABC notation.
PURL: A Portable Content Store - Not Enough Neon
I need to wrap my head around the details of this approach, but it sounds like it might be something I could do here on my site (where I feel nervous about my current dependency on a database).
I Dreamed of a Perfect Database | New Republic
A really nice piece by Paul Ford on the history of databases and the dream of the Semantic Web.
Sometimes I get a little wistful. The vision of a world of connected facts, one big, living library, remains beautiful, and unfulfilled.
One thing though: the scrolling on this page is sooooo janky that I had to switch off JavaScript just to read these words comfortably.
How to support full Unicode in MySQL databases · Mathias Bynens
Some good database character-encoding advice from Mathias.
ID card database destroyed - a set on Flickr
For once, I’m happy to see data being destroyed.
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
You can now store (and scale) MySQL databases with Amazon. Handy.
Amazon.com: The Manga Guide to Databases: Mana Takahashi, Shoko Azuma, Trend-pro Ltd.: Books
Now *this* is how you explain technical concepts.
Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive » WebKit Does HTML5 Client-side Database Storage
I just learned from Kelly that Webkit is supporting local storage and database queries, as proposed in HTML5. Kinda like Google Gears. Potentially excited for the iPhone/iPod Touch.
xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe
Yes, you have to be a bit of a database geek to find this funny but if you are, this is very funny indeed.
Mysql database migration and special characters | Orthogonal Thought
This article is a life-saver for me. I'm constantly having trouble with special characters when I'm backing up databases for local copies of my sites.