+ Hi, Pablo here +
+ ++
I want code defined dashboards so badly
+For decades, Data teams and data gardeners in general have used specific tools to build dashboards. This + are also called reports, data tools, data products, and another gazillion funny names.
+For the sake of clarity, when I say dashboard here, I refer to some piece of software that people look at + on a screen where they text, tables and charts, as well as a few controls to play with what they can see + (filters and selectors, mostly).
++ Analysts and other species are expected to build lots of this. Some business person needs to know stuff, + so the analyst goes and builds a dashboard the person can look at. +
++ My description of a dashboard is very open, so there's a million ways to technically implement one. The + thing is, analysts are analyts, not software engineers. If I ask my good colleague Uri, who is a + wonderful analyst, to code you up your KPIs dashboard from scratch with React, he's going to take + somewhere between six weeks and two years. Not great. +
++ This being the case, we've had multiple generations of tools that have tried to make it simpler for + people to build dashboards. The whole point of them shouldn't take knowing linked lists and big O + notation to say "put what comes out of this `SELECT * FROM thingie` into a line chart". +
++ These tools are abstractions, and like all abstractions, they will be opinionated, restrict your freedom + and be leaky to some degree. +
++ At the time I'm writing this, I feel the most popular tools out there to do this work are Looker, + Tableau, Power BI. And all of them have something I hate deeply: You can't put a dashboard in + Git*. +
+-
+
- the past and current landscape +
- the issues and what i crave for +
- green shoots +
*You actually can put a Power BI dashboard in Git, but it's quite useless since the best format they + can offer you is a sea of unreadable JSON you would never dare to touch without Power BI desktop, + much less parse yourself.
++ +