Nice! Congrats on shipping. Any particular reason it's tied closely together with sqlite rather sqlalchemy which could potentially enable a range of backends? I guess to ensure immutability?
The "REST API for your database" thing isn't actually the part of this I'm most excited about - there are quite a few entries in that category already, such as https://github.com/jeffknupp/sandman2
The thing that excites me is being able to take almost any dataset, package it up into a simple, well-understood format and then deploy that in a read-only, highly scalable way, taking advantage of modern containerization systems.
Read-only SQLite is /perfect/ for this use-case. It's fast, widely supported, has a great feature-set and can be distributed as a single file.
My favourite feature of Datasette isn't the web UI, it's the publish command:
datasette publish now ~/path-to-my/sqlite.db