Metabase Blog

I love Metabase (https://www.metabase.com/) and used it successfully with business users, too (small hedge fund). If it's not too much data, getting it out as .csv and using R + data.table + dplyr, etc; = incredible productivity. See [1]

Use Excel, QlikSense and Tableau if Business Users need visualization. Excel pivot tables = OG data reshaping. Resist more complicated solutions : do you really need more than Excel?

QlikSense doesn't get enough love. It's actually better than Tableau at some scenarios. Or PowerBI if you're a Microsoft shop. Last time I checked, Power BI's Q&A [2] was a KILLER FEATURE. "Show me Sales per Region, Quarterly" and then you get to fine tune it. R and Shiny dashboards = last resort; too much bespoke work. 2 months using R + Shiny can be 1 week in Tableau / QlikSense / PowerBI.

1. "Efficient reshaping using data.tables" https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/vignettes/datatable-reshape.html

2. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/natural-language/q-and-a-intro

Metabase | https://metabase.com | REMOTE | Full-time | Backend Engineers, Frontend Engineers, and Engineering Managers

Metabase is open source analytics software that lets anyone in your company rummage around in the databases you have. It connects to a number of databases / data warehouses (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Postgres, MySQL, etc).

People rather like the product (https://metabase.com/love). We're a remote team full of people who care about user experience, making complicated things as simple as possible and building things. We have a deeply pragmatic engineering culture and value building things that people actually use vs whatever closes a deal or makes for a good press release.

Tech stack: Clojure, Typescript, React, Redux, AWS https://github.com/metabase/metabase

Please apply here https://www.metabase.com/jobs and then email me at vamsi@metabase, I'll find your application internally and review it

Metabase | https://metabase.com | REMOTE | Full-time | Backend, Frontend, Full Stack, and DevOps engineers

Metabase is open source analytics software that lets anyone in your company rummage around in the databases you have. It connects to a number of databases / data warehouses (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Postgres, MySQL, etc).

People rather like the product (metabase.com/love). We're a remote team full of people who care about user experience, making complicated things as simple as possible and building things. We have a deeply pragmatic engineering culture and value building things that people actually use vs whatever closes a deal or makes for a good press release.

Tech stack: Clojure, Typescript, React, Redux, AWS

Roles: Engineering Managers, Data Analysts, Frontend/DevOps/Backend Engineering, Success Engineers, and more.

See https://www.metabase.com/jobs

The solution really depends on what sort of problems you are trying to solve and who your customers are.

There are a fair few low-code solutions out there for reporting and data visualisation that are great for finance and marketing teams for example. e.g. https://metabase.com/ , https://evidence.dev/

For multipurpose SMB workflows and organisational processes, I have used n8n in the recent past and found it was quite good and incredibly easy to maintain. https://n8n.io/engineering-resources/

For enterprise processes I'd go with Camunda (solely based on recommendations and not first hand experience). Although only parts of their platform are OSS https://github.com/camunda

Bear in mind that some of these are not suitable if you want to build something that competes with them while taking their OSS code. But are perfectly fine otherwise.

I'm a big fan of Firebase and have seen a lot of projects get up and running very quickly and scale as well.

However, I think there are an increasing amount of reasons why you want to have your data stored in a SQL database that you can access. The open source tooling being built around SQL (usually Postgres) as a standard is becoming better and better and it's going to be hard for Firebase to compete with all those offerings. If I run a Postgres database I can instantly have tools like Hasura [0], Metabase [1] along with others that add a ton of value out of the box. However, maybe those tools will also integrate with Firebase.

Anyway, my point is that this is best of both worlds, so great to see!

[0] https://github.com/hasura/graphql-engine
[1] https://www.metabase.com/

> CI

GitHub Actions

> deployments/rollbacks

Docker. Scaleway offers a container registry that's ridiculously cheap[1]. Deployments are infrequent and executed manually.

> DBs

Again, Scaleway's managed RDS[2].

Outside these, we have setup Grafana + Loki cloud[3] for monitoring and alerting. They have a generous free plan.

For product analytics that can be derived from our database we've a self hosted instance of Metabase[4].

[1]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/container-registry/

[2]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/database/

[3]: https://grafana.com/

[4]: https://www.metabase.com/

P.S. We were a 1 person company when most of this was setup. We're 3 now, works just as well.