Monday, 22nd March 2021
The Accountability Project Datasettes. The Accountability Project “curates, standardizes and indexes public data to give journalists, researchers and others a simple way to search across otherwise siloed records”—they have a wide range of useful data, and they’ve started experimenting with Datasette to provide SQL access to a subset of the information that they have collected.
TIL
Running gdb against a Python process in a running Docker container
— While investigating [Datasette issue #1268](https://github.com/simonw/datasette/issues/1268) I found myself with a Python process that was hanging, and I decided to try running `gdb` against it based on tips in [Debugging of CPython processes with gdb](https://www.podoliaka.org/2016/04/10/debugging-cpython-gdb/)
TIL
Tracing every executed Python statement
— Today I learned how to use the Python [trace module](https://docs.python.org/3/library/trace.html) to output every single executed line of Python code in a program - useful for figuring out exactly when a crash or infinite loop happens.
TIL
Installing packages from Debian unstable in a Docker image based on stable
— 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 image ("buster" is the current stable release of Debian) but include a single package from "sid", the unstable Debian distribution.
