hughess

Hi, I'm one of the founders of Evidence. We're in the process of overhauling our docs and I'd love to hear any issues you ran into so we can make them better. Any feedback appreciated!

Did you end up finding the map examples?

Thank you - I can’t seem to change it now, but good to know for next time. Appreciate the feedback!

Fair point - was just listing out the tools used in this viz library! The leaflet examples are at the bottom of that page.

What would you suggest as a better title?

This is great - I used to use R all the time when I worked in finance and wish I had this resource back then!

R and RMarkdown were big inspirations for what we're building at evidence.dev now, so very grateful to everyone involved in the R community

Examples from this fairly custom implementation: https://docs.evidence.dev/components/all-components/

We use echarts at https://evidence.dev and have been quite happy with it. We do a lot of embedded analytics and it's worked well for us.

Great article and big fan of this approach.

I'm one of the maintainers of Evidence (open source tool based on markdown + SQL) and working on a similar approach to creating presentation tables configurable in code.

Some examples here for any SQL + table enthusiasts: https://docs.evidence.dev/components/data-table

We recently changed our architecture to include interactivity without having to pre-render all combinations. Pages are still pre-rendered with their initial content, but each Evidence app now ships with filter components and an in-browser DuckDB instance so you can build interactive apps. We call this Universal SQL - if you're interested, we wrote up our rationale for doing this here: https://evidence.dev/blog/why-we-built-usql/

Here's an example project with some filter components and custom styling: https://ecommerce.evidence.app/

This is still a static app - the data warehouse was only hit during the app's build process

I'm one of the founders of Evidence (https://evidence.dev) - would be great to hear about your experience. Reaching out now!

You might be interested in Evidence, a SQL-based open source BI tool where all content is version-controllable. Disclaimer: I’m one of the maintainers. A lot of companies use Evidence for customer facing and embedded reporting.

https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence

Previous HN discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 (91 comments)

We're fans of Obsidian! DataView looks cool - love the ability to define the tables in code inline in the markdown. That's similar to how we inline DuckDB WASM SQL queries in markdown: https://docs.evidence.dev/core-concepts/queries/

We use ECharts in our open source BI tool (Evidence) and it's a great library. Has helped us build a declarative syntax for viz which can be version controlled (https://evidence.dev)

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments)

I found this difficult as well, so I ended up making this Google sheet to compare: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1belBpTKOPGaCC230l0ns...

We used ECharts to build our charting library at Evidence and it’s been a great experience overall (https://evidence.dev).

We started with D3 and a few other tools, but felt that we get a lot more out of the box with ECharts, like interactivity and an events API. ECharts is also a lot more extensible than people give it credit for.

If anyone is curious, we documented the process of selecting a charting library after assessing several options: https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence/issues/136

That fiddling used to drive me nuts in any of the tools I used to work with. It's part of the problem I'm trying to solve with my current open source project (evidence.dev) where we're tackling viz-as-code. You might find it interesting.

Previous HN discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 (91 comments)

I spent 5 years leading a data team which produced reports for hundreds of users.

In our team’s experience, the most important factor in getting engagement from users is including the right context directly within the report - definitions, caveats, annotations, narrative. This pre-empts a lot of questions about the report, but more importantly builds trust in what the data is showing (vs having a user self-serve, nervous that they’re making a decision with bad data - ultimately they’ll reach out to an analyst to get them to do the analysis for them).

The second most important factor was loading speed - we noticed that after around 8 seconds of waiting, business users would disengage with a report, or lose trust in the system presenting the information (“I think it’s broken”). Most often this resulted in people not logging in to look at reports - they were busy with tons of other things, so once they expected reports to take a while to load, they stopped coming back.

The third big finding was giving people data where they already are, in a format they understand. A complicated filter interface would drive our users nuts and turned into many hours of training and technical support. For this reason, we always wanted a simple UI with great mobile support for reports - our users were on the go and could already do most other things on their phones.

We couldn’t achieve these things in BI tools, so for important decisions, we had to move the work to tools that could offer text support, instant report loading, and a familiar and accessible format: PowerPoint, PDF, and email. Of course this is a difficult workflow to automate and maintain, but for us it was crucial to get engagement on the work we were producing, and it worked.

This experience inspired my colleague and I to start an open source BI tool which could achieve these things with a more maintainable, version controlled workflow. The tool is called Evidence (https://evidence.dev) if anyone is interested.

I'm one of the maintainers of Evidence.dev - happy to answer any questions here