Hi, Pablo here

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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*.

*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.

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