Streamlit and a trivial cities explorer

I spent a little time this morning learning the basics of Streamlit. Earlier this month I had found a US cities dataset¹ and decided to use Streamlit to explore city populations. 

This dashboard shows each state's population along with a state selector to dynamically show a state's city's population along with a map showing its location and relative population size. 

While it took me much of the morning to figure out how to use the Streamlit and Pandas SDKs, along with a side-quest on how to debug a Streamlit application in Visual Studio Code, the final application is hearteningly trivial at barely a dozen lines of Python.

1. Unfortunately, the dataset of not very good based on what I know about RI and NH cities and towns.

Jenson's stuck desktop and Foster's recalibration of the futurism

I suspect many of you have seen by now Scott Jenson's presentation "Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever?" But, if you have not then it is worth your time. I went on to read the book he mentions Nick Foster's Could Should Might Don't: How We Think About the Future. Jenson's presentation suggests that Foster's book is a "how to", but it is more a useful survey of, and a call for the recalibration of, the futurism field.

Classic Design Patterns: Where Are They Now

Brandon Rhodes' talk "Classic Design Patterns: Where Are They Now" is a good critique of the "Gang of 4" Design Patterns book that dominated software design thinking for decades. Why should you give your attention to a critique of a book from 1994? In part because the critique gives concert examples of how successful design solutions become molded into programming languages and how programming languages outgrow the limitations that originally necessitated the design solution.

I don't know of the speaker, but he seems to speak at many Python conferences.