wtf is datasette.io?

The datasette.io repository contains the code behind the official website for Datasette, which is itself a tool for exploring and publishing data. Instead of using a traditional website platform like WordPress or a standard web framework, the site is built using Datasette itself. It is a real-world example of the tool powering its own marketing site and documentation hub. At a high level, the project works by turning data files into a functioning website. The site's content lives in database files rather than typical web pages. Custom templates and plugins control how that data appears to visitors, and the whole thing is automatically built and deployed to Google Cloud Run using GitHub Actions whenever changes are made. If you want to run it locally, you can download the existing database files directly or generate them from scratch using a build script that pulls in information via a GitHub token. This project would be useful for anyone curious about unconventional approaches to building websites, especially founders or product managers dealing with content-heavy sites. For example, if you have a directory of tools, a catalog of resources, or a documentation site where structured data is the main focus, this repo demonstrates how you can serve that data directly as a polished website without needing a separate content management system. It is also directly relevant to anyone already using Datasette who wants to see how far they can push custom templates and plugins. The most notable thing about this project is its "Baked Data" architectural pattern, which the README references. Instead of querying a live database every time a visitor loads a page, the data is prepared and "baked" into files ahead of time. This tradeoff means the site can be extremely fast and easy to deploy, since it is essentially serving pre-built data rather than running complex queries on the fly.