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Ask HN: Spreadsheet/Grid interface as an operations back end?
This is a product design question. im wondering has anyone here scaled up using spreadsheet based interfaces to run operations ? Think ecommerce/Amazon - would you have been successful building your operations/shipping/accounting systems on a Google sheets like panel (connected to an API) ?
Its a tradeoff between operations that need to be operating on a single "row of data" (one user, one account, one order, etc) versus bulk updates "update all as shipped", etc
Is a spreadsheet the perfect paradigm that solves for both ?
- gregorymichael 9y agoBuilt a non-trivial internal app with Flask + Google Spreadsheets this year (wrote up a blog post on the plumbing). It was fantastic for rapidly deploying a prototype, opening up data entry to non-technical folks without having to build a CUD interface or worry about authentication. I did start running into problems with API rate limiting and speed. Not sure this would work for a large amount of data, but it was easily the most productive app I've built in terms of lines of code vs. impact it had on the organization. https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/02/an-easy-way-to-read-and-write-to-a-google-spreadsheet-in-python.html https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/02/an-easy-way-to-read-and-...