Introduce Yourself: New Member Monday [November]

Introductions
#1

Hello community :wave:

This is a thread to welcome all of our new Baserow members. Maybe you are new to the community and still figuring it out, or maybe you’ve been here for a while but haven’t had the chance to say hello! Either way, we want to welcome you into our family of tinkerers, so don’t be shy — pop in and introduce yourself! We’re already happy to e-meet you :hugs:

Don’t know what to tell? Use the template below:

  • My current role is:
  • My current location is:
  • You can ask me about:
  • I use Baserow for:
  • I like Baserow for:

:question: New members! Please reply below to introduce yourself and tell us: What do you value the most in a product?

1 Like
#2

Hi,
I’m Derek and I’m in the process of setting up a little company for the purpose of making small electronic devices for a niche community. I’m also generally the sort of person who hates having to put serious engineering work into building my tools, when I’d rather put that effort directly into my actual projects and products.

One thing I’ve been in desperate need of is a manufacturing database of sorts. Something where I can keep track of everything I’m building, all the way from component inspection through shippable end products. I’ve never been comfortable fumbling around in office-suite DB-like apps (e.g. Libreoffice Base), and have always wanted something easy to make work for me.

The lowest friction option here was always just to use and abuse spreadsheets. That’s what so many people do now, for similar reasons. They offer the greatest flexibility and usability for editing data in a tabular format. However, what I’ve always really wanted was something that combines the benefits of a spreadsheet with the power of a database to actually create relationships across the data.

What drew me to Baserow was the way it attempts to accomplish this, the fact that I actually can self-host, and that it gives me an API. While the majority of my use is just via the web interface, I have written a utility that uses the API to import calibration data from my products directly into Baserow.

For getting data out of Baserow (e.g. to my label maker software for labeling products), I’m still doing that with copy-paste to a spreadsheet template. Eventually I’m probably going to need to write an API-based tool for that too, but I wish I didn’t have to.

While I’m generally pleased with what Baserow offers, I feel like there’s this constant struggle between “keep the tool simple” and “give the tool powerful features.” Like I get the benefits of merging a spreadsheet with a database, in exchange for getting versions of both that are simplified down so far that its seriously harms the utility of either.

I’m really looking forward to the post 1.13 releases, and have high hopes that they’ll start to bridge these gaps.

2 Likes
#3

Hello Derek, thank you for introducing yourself, it’s a pleasure to get to know you a bit better :wave:

Nice! Even though there certainly are limitations to building without code, the low-code and no-code industries are developing fast and pushing the limits of what can be done with databases, visual development, and automation tools, etc. without digging dive into serious engineering work. What gives more possibilities for people who can’t or don’t want to code.

Well noted! Keeping the balance between being a powerful database and ‘no-code required’ is not easy :sweat_smile:

Derek, we are very lucky to have you among our community members. That’s very important that you’re pushing us to work on some standard spreadsheet convenience features and make it less painful for users who switched from Excel-like tools to use Baserow (because we have a lot of users just like you). We are not a spreadsheet, but we understand that the suggestions you left are addressing the user experience within the tool, so we plan to work on these improvements.

#4

My current role is: Founder - Product management and Sales
My current location is: New Delhi - India
We can discuss about: How to customize Baserow front-end to build Application
I use Base row for: Self hosted , a SaaS product to build faster internal tools for supply chain

#5

Hello @dhruv_marketrics, welcome to the Baserow community!

We are glad to meet you :wave: