Ryan Robitaille

March Update: Everything is a subscription, Flow shadows, Canvas map pulling

Quick March development round up on some of the bigger, "demoable" things. I'm running slightly behind my planned release schedule, but I think it will be worth it - much more was accomplished than I had in my roadmap when I made the January video. Hope

The flow "abstraction ladder" - more than ETL

Lots of effort in the last couple of months has been on "flow" endeavors, and possibly put me behind schedule a little bit. I think it's an investment in the whole system though - and I think you'll agree. Why are flows good and

February: Flow layout, Echoes, Flow push-UI, Conditional Pathing, Map Pulling, Flow Views

Been hard at work and haven't been posting - but I wanted to give a quick round up of some of the things that I've been working on. As always, forgive the Twitter videos, but it's my "go to" for stream of

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Flow Based Mullet UI

Business in the front, party in the back? Yes. Mostly. Creating and running flows is great. The visuals, the feedback loop, the almost lincoln-log-esque sense of operating something in real, tangible space. Something that can be sorely missing for a builder. But when that's all said and done

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Icons, Minimize, Pin, Tabs as Blocks... Data Desktops?

Just a few more tools for your Data UI toolkit. All customizable, of course. Publishing a number of posts today of things that got finished in the last week or so since the announcement video. First up, some OS-like utility in your data boards - again, always optional, just another

"Hey Lights" Demo, Voice Params, Flow Phrase Triggers?

A bit of an impromptu video for you today, just a few days after the "big" RVBBIT Winter Preview video - which has been very well received, so I thank you all for that. I was up late working on a basic Hue Lights board that I want

"Calliope" Rabbit AI (Easter Egg)

You might have seen a curious little outro bit to the RVBBIT Winter Preview release date announcement video if you hung in there long enough. I spoke about it a little bit on Twitter, which I'll include below. Still very much in the testing and experimenting phase, but

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CanvaSQL is now RVBBIT, coming in March!

Appreciate all of you following my experiments, links, and micro dev blogging here - but it's almost time. If it wasn't apparent already, this video should give you a pretty good idea of what I'm going for with RVBBIT (just say 'rabbit'

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Advanced Flows.. Event Chains, Board Subscriptions 👀

Flow integrations continue... I was going to save "ETL stuff" for after release as an add-on, until I realized that I can instead make it a hackable visual blueprints play that can read & write to any part of the sys (actions, scripts, mutate client UI, cross-client, sub-flows.

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Adding "flows" into the mix...

You knew it was coming eventually... I've been chasing this idea for several years of a "unified" prezi/logic interface (all flow-based), while very cool, it isn't always practical for day to day data work AND prod dashboarding. Better? A solid prezi/exploration layer

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Rabbit "Kits" (mods, without the horse armor)

User-writable plugins that allow extra functionality. "Sidecar operations" for deeper analysis, generating special viz types, internal functionality, etc. Making integrations easy (or easier) for the end users... Rabbit "Mods". 🐇 Shipping w outliers, forecasting & more. Plug-ins that allow users to run "sidecar" operations on

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Vibes: more dynamic theming..

Yeah, I'm full of teasers lately. But hey, presentation is a big part of people consuming your data content. Having more levers to pull (even if you never use them) is never a bad thing IMHO. Build a bunch of stuff & forget "what depends on what&

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Data-driven theme params

Formatting nerds unite. 👀 I'm a dashboard formatting nerd, so being able to parametrize *everything* is great. Diff filter values get diff color schemes? Yes. Change the viz? Change the tab? Yes. Yes. Spent a couple hours building this test board & am pleased with how putting stuff together

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Storyboards & custom views? Nah. Snapshots!

Take a snapshot of the state of all parameters, sizes, locations - and then swap between them like dashboard tabs. When you app runs on "everything is automatically a parameter", this can get very interesting. Storyboards & custom views? Nah. Snapshots! Content untouched but all params, filters, coords,

Viz *inside* table grids? Yes.

That about explains it. ;) Dragging a compatible already-made viz on to a grid and watch it "weave by dimension X"... Experimenting a bit. Taking an *existing* viz block & "weaving it" across a compatible dimension *inside* a separate data table (regardless of data source)... Hmmm... 👀 pic.

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"Code tables" as general purpose escape hatches...

Write some backend Clojure code - the system interprets it as a SQL table, use it as a SQL table. Filter, join, aggregate, etc. Better yet, save the "code table" as a view -and in production your end-users can use it and never even know it's

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"Visual History" for views and queries

Also works as a great place to put (100% optional) GPT recommendations, if that is something you're into. (but like I said, not a prerequisite - even the base viz recommendation system is 100% not AI enabled and just locally calculated on your machine) Just a quick dev-log

Drill Down / Drill "Through"

Quick Twitter video of it in action. Things are getting interesting! Drill-down / drill "through". Any aggregate can be reduced to it's base group-bys, even hopping down though nested sub-queries if need be. The spawning summary grid becomes a "super filter" for the drilldown grid.

"Pivot-by/this" 🐇

Explicit pivoting should be a first class feature in all SQL tools, right up there with group-by. Check out these quick video demos below. 0:00 /0:55 1× More visual SQL tools need explicit "pivot-by-this" functionality. Pivot is always dope. Bonus points: Pivoting by *another SQL query*

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Still Cooking - New viz reco flow & "easy" field swap for recos

It's been a minute - good news though, I am now working on this project full-time. Excited to get it in people's SQL loving hands. But to tide you over before some more substantial posts, here is a couple of really cool things I have been

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Teaser - "Quick Filter" Shortcut

Filtering a table or query-set by one of it's resulting fields is super common and while I have a (wonderful) system in place for this - I wanted to make an alternate "quick(er)" method of doing it. Here is a GIF of the "manual

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Teaser - Column re-ordering and re-sizing

I don't know about you, but I can't stand data apps where the result-set allows re-sizing by dragging the edges of the columns over. I know it seems intuitive, but too often it just results in frustration - either due to the drag target being too

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Teaser - Sub-query "Lineage Lines"

In a tool that's all about creating sub-aggregations & re-aggregations (or slicing and dicing) of tables - it can be pretty important to understand how all the queries are related (if at all). While not something you'd have on in a production dashboard - I added

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Teaser - Testing how themes are working...

"User Params as Theme System" is actually working out well, I think people will enjoy being able to pull themes out of previously saved dashboards and swapping them around. ;) Check out the very short Twitter video at the bottom to see how they are applied... * Browse the existing

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Dev Update: Scrubbable User Params = Themes

Quick update on a "Theme System" - I decided that it made more sense to have a scrubbable user parameter system and use that for theme parts instead. Not everyone likes my color palettes so its a win/win. "Scrubbable User Param System w/ Theme Hooks"