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<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
<head>
<title>Pablo here</title>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta viewport="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../styles.css">
</head>
<body>
<main>
<h1>
Hi, Pablo here
</h1>
<p><a href="../index.html">back to home</a></p>
<hr>
<section>
<h2>I want code defined dashboards so badly</h2>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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".
</p>
<p>
These tools are abstractions, and like all abstractions, they will be opinionated, restrict your freedom
and <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/" target="_blank"
rel="noopener noreferrer">be leaky</a> to some degree.
</p>
<p>
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: <strong>You can't put a dashboard in
Git*.</strong>
</p>
<ul>
<li>the past and current landscape</li>
<li>the issues and what i crave for</li>
<li>green shoots</li>
</ul>
<p><em>*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.</em></p>
<hr>
<p><a href="../index.html">back to home</a></p>
</section>
</main>
</body>
</html>