studio VS Metabase

> Especially a tool like RViz is always missing. And in many many robotics video I see (of a moderately complex robot), there's ROS's RViz on some screen.

I would love the future robotics development stack to be more modular, so that (for example) future middleware solutions don't need to also bundle their own visualization software. This was direct inspiration for creating Foxglove Studio[0] for visualization and MCAP[1] for logging - both work great with ROS, or equally well without it.

[0] https://github.com/foxglove/studio

[1] https://github.com/foxglove/mcap

That's the true strength of combining existing open source solutions. Thanks for the great support of Foxglove Inc. over the past few years.

Foxglove | Remote (US time zones) | Full Time or Contract | https://foxglove.dev/

Foxglove is the leading observability platform for robotics developers. We help robotics and AV companies log, ingest, organize, and visualize multimodal data. Join our small, highly experienced, and fast moving team. Prior experience working in robotics or AV is a bonus but not necessary.

* Senior Frontend Engineer (TypeScript, React, bonus if you have WebGL experience)

* Senior Full Stack Engineer (TypeScript, Go)

* Senior SRE/Infrastructure/DevOps Engineer (GCP, AWS, Azure, Terraform, K8s)

https://foxglove.dev/careers

Email in profile if you have questions.

It's a common misconception that you need a ML or robotics PhD to work in the field. There are plenty of frontend & backend web engineering, data engineering, and infrastructure/devops roles available at robotics companies - you don't need to be a domain expert.

For example, at Foxglove[0] we are building open source web-based visualization and data management for robotics (shameless plug: currently hiring).

[0] https://foxglove.dev/

You can use the rosbag commandline-tool to figure out all of this: http://wiki.ros.org/rosbag/Commandline rosbag info for example can give you some of the type/number of messages information. For more complex stuff, you could use https://foxglove.dev/ to visualize and inspect rosbags

Web-based data visualization for robotics and self-driving. Robotics is such an interesting industry, and we're only scratching the surface of what new tools are needed.

Try it live here (hit "view sample data"): https://studio.foxglove.dev/

And it's open source! https://github.com/foxglove/studio

Shameless plug - we're hiring: https://foxglove.dev/careers

When our team at Foxglove announced MCAP, we wanted to empower teams to spend less time building commodity tools and more time tackling their hardest robotics challenges.

Foxglove | Remote (Americas/Oceania) | Full Time or Contract | https://foxglove.dev/

Dev tools for robotics and autonomous vehicles.

Robotics will have a massive positive impact on the world economy and global human productivity over the coming decade. At Foxglove, we're building powerful web-based open source & commercial tools to accelerate this trend.

We're a small, highly experienced, and fast moving team. We're looking to hire several more people (most roles don't require previous robotics experience, unless specified below):

- Senior Frontend Engineer (react, typescript, some webgl+wasm)

- Senior Full Stack Engineer (typescript, some golang)

- First Product Manager (robotics/AV experience required)

- First Account Executive (infrastructure SaaS experience required)

https://foxglove.dev/

https://foxglove.dev/careers

React + Typescript. Forgot to mention it’s open source so you can see for yourself:

https://github.com/foxglove/studio

Remote Code Execution via H2

We've used it for about a year - Blazer is okay if you need a quick SQL query console, but we found it lacking as an actual business intelligence tool. The support for graphs and dashboards is limited, for graphs it requires you to structure the query in an exact way as you can see in the Blazer readme.

After some research on available alternatives that don't break the bank, we decided to deploy a self-hosted instance of Metabase[0]. This took only a few minutes to set up using their Docker image[1] and it has much better graphing capabilities and you can easily put a custom layout together for dashboards. Upgrading is similarly easy (just redeploy). Also easy to configure: data sources, hiding or changing the data type of a column, G Suite sign-in for our domain. Highly recommend it if you need anything more than Blazer's table output.

[0]: https://github.com/metabase/metabase

I've never used Tableau, but heard a lot of hate about it. However, in my previous role, we were big fans of Metabase (https://metabase.com). You can also self-host it, which was a huge win for us.

It seems folks want a working example. Here's one in prod:

Metabase is a BI tool, backend written mostly in Clojure. Like basically all BI tools they have this intermediate representation language thing so you write the same thing in "MBQL (metabase query language)" and it theoretically becomes same query in like, Postgres and Mongo and whatever. End user does not usually write MBQL, it's a service for the frontend querybuilding UI thing and lots of other frontend UI stuff mainly in usage.

Whole processing from MBQL -> your SQL or whatever is done via a buncha big-ass transducers. Metabase is not materially faster than other BI tools (because all the other BI tools do something vaguely similar in their langs) but it's pretty comparable speed and the whole thing was materially written by like 5 peeps

https://github.com/metabase/metabase/blob/master/src/metabas...

(nb: I used to work for Metabase but currently do not. but open core is open core)

They haven't released the source, and the compiled versions are non-trivial to diff (e.g. there are nondeterministic numbers from the clojure compiler that seem to have changed from one to the other, and .clj files have been removed from the jar).

The old version has `hash=1bb88f5`, which is a public commit: https://github.com/metabase/metabase/commit/1bb88f5

We are unsure about the right license to use, so this is a great feedback. We had a MIT license one week ago that we know that we cannot hold on long term and we felt we were lying to the community by keeping an MIT license and changing it in one year.

By using AGPL, we feel it's the right level of restriction. It's the license used by Metabase for example (https://github.com/metabase/metabase) that many companies use internally.

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.

Anyway, I have a collection of scripts that merge ActivityWatch data from all my machines and WakaTime exports to a PostgreSQL database which I then query with a project called Metabase. If you're curious, the scripts are in a repository called sqrt-data. I've been playing with this for ~4-5 years already I think.

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).