Show HN: I built an open-source data viz tool that connects to DBs and APIs
github.comNot to knockdown the project, great effort. But there are many existing solutions like metabase, redash, etc. What differentiates this?
No worries, I get this all the time and all I can say now is that functionality-wise most of those existing solutions are better.
The difference is in the mission I have planned for Chartbrew. I want to focus more on the user-centric and collaborative design rather than on functionality. So Chartbrew will never be as complex as many other tools there, but I'm 100% sure I can design it better. And I also plan to focus a lot on building a community interested in innovation and design. Hope this wasn't too vague. Feel free to ask me any other questions and I can clarify a bit more on different aspects.
Hey everybody,
I wanted to share with all of you the project I’ve been working for a while now called Chartbrew. It is an open-source data visualisation tool that can connect to APIs or certain databases to fetch the data directly from there. At the moment it’s possible to create time series and simple pattern charts.
I started working on this with my partner in crime in the summer of 2018 and had a huge break of almost a year of not working that much on the project. In September this year, I decided to refactor the code and offer it as an open-source solution.
It was an amazing decision and since then I’ve been actively working on it whenever I get a break from uni and work. I also started streaming the progress and in the past couple of weeks I’ve been streaming almost every evening until around 1 AM, then continuing until 2-3AM in my bed.
I realised that I actually enjoy working more on the project since I decided to not treat it as a business. The initial idea was to create this as a SaaS and try our best to focus on the business aspects of it. Well, all that led to the period of burnout. Now it actually feels good to sit down, code, design and come up with new ideas.
I’ve been studying HCI research, UX design and data visualisation for the past 1.5 years and I now plan to pour all this knowledge in making Chartbrew a different and a better tool than the multiple existing ones out there.
Some items in the Roadmap coming soon:
* Re-designing the chart creation screens completely
* Allow combining data connections and plot charts from these combination
* Adding collaboration tools to co-create charts with other people remotely
* Collaboratively analyse dashboards, write notes, etc.
More here (needs a bit of re-work) - https://trello.com/b/IQ7eiDqZ/chartbrew-roadmap
I will be more than thrilled to welcome everybody in the community I’m creating around Chartbrew. Any contribution is welcomed, from feedback, suggestions and code help. The code is still a bit “all over the place” since the project didn’t completely move from the MVP stage, but I made progress towards fixing that.
Thanks a lot for reading! Let me know what you think of Chartbrew :)
---
I will leave some links here if you want to find out more about what I’m doing around Chartbrew:
Streaming a lot here lately: https://www.twitch.tv/razvanilin
A brief story of Chartbrew: https://razvanilin.com/the-chartbrew-journey/
Started being more active on twitter if you want to keep in touch: https://twitter.com/razvanilin
ChartBrew community on Slack: https://bit.ly/2sx5ni9
…or Discord: https://discord.gg/zHmc7nm
By the way, I'm streaming on Twitch at the moment if you wanna join while I work on Chartbrew. I will probably stream until midnight CET :)