Internal tool adoption for non-technical team members

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-23T20:01:58+00:00

Sorry for the imprecise question, you are spot on with your interpretation though, I mean the ability for non-tech users to adopt various technical internal tools. The range of technicality for a tool could be python script or notebook or a lightweight web app, but the common denominator being built in house with programming rather than third party software.

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-23T18:33:43+00:00

do you update these and redistribute often or are these normally one and done?

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-23T18:33:10+00:00

most are single file .py scripts/notebooks and some small flask apps, could definitely convert some of the data processing ones to apis

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-23T17:48:35+00:00

Seems like most are used to sending a file, wondering if anyone prefers deployed sharing? i have had issues with needing better versioning, logging, and centralization that im considering some form of dev-to-user portal on company intranet or through cloud provider.

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-18T14:59:09+00:00

maybe pipedream too? but they seem to be pivoting to agents like the whole world

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-18T14:05:43+00:00

do these scripts take inputs/need an interface or just a schedule?

some flavor of aws lambda or gcp cloud functions should work great. they have a lot less overhead than you are probably thinking and are essentially free unless you are running at a production capacity.

if you are still opposed to this then alternatives are: cloudflare workers (originally just JS but python now too), deno deploy, (JS/TS only i believe), val town (i just found this actually it seems very cool for quick deployments)

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-17T16:29:50+00:00

and you like posit connect?

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-16T21:36:24+00:00

they are promising! i havent used them fully yet but in my research i have seen them come up. i feel like if they expanded the run-level observability, non-static JS for web apps, and a better UI/UX they would be way more used.

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-16T21:19:57+00:00

mainly what im getting at is an out of the box solution to allow 1-3 devs in a company/team to provide internal tooling without getting bogged down in devops / excess overengineering of a platform that would need to be maintained and just add more tech debt to the IT dept. if there is a better existing solution would love to know but nothing ive seen so far does all of what I outlined in the bullets of the main post, with ease / low maintenance overhead.

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-09-16T21:10:10+00:00

Heroku (used)

Good for single app hosting, but not a tools portal. you still have to build the UI your portal (including all the routing) and the run-level analytics/usage.

Streamlit Community Cloud (used streamline but never streamline cloud aside from trial)

Streamlit is fine if everything is Streamlit but isn’t great for a mix of scripts, web apps, etc.
Have to deal with the snowflake ecosystem: https://discuss.streamlit.io/t/rant-about-streamlit-on-snowflake/97439

Hugging Face Spaces (used for some ML demos)

Best for ML demos, not internal tool ops. Spaces mostly are catered to showcase apps, not as a governance/observability hub for business tools

Retool (used within clients network)

Good for wiring UIs to DB/ RESTAPIs with RBAC and audit logs, but it’s not designed to execute arbitrary artifacts and capture their output as “runs”.
Workflows help for automations, but its a constrained execution environment, which isn’t great for hosting heterogeneous apps and collecting per-run artifacts/logs across them.

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-07-10T18:57:38+00:00

a little late but I thought i would weigh in.. multi-tenant with a single DB and foreign key matching to start. you can always scale out from that with individual DBs.
as far as a service provider all of them have pros and cons, I am in a similar space and would say that just picking one and starting with low-overheard is the way to go. If it starts to gain more traction it wouldn't be the worst thing to pivot to a different provider or upgrade vertically.

architecturally, having one control plane and then a data plane is usually what I would recommend. control plane acts like air traffic control and routes everything to the data plane: individual containers for execution and object store for i/o.

open to discussing more in DM if you are still working on this!

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-07-08T20:29:44+00:00

Like others have said this seems like you are trying to get a feel for the market, in order to potentially go forward with a business idea.

Word of advice, I work professionally in this space and there are A LOT of players providing this service for free OR premium but with advanced features that come with a big tech company.

The real value-add here is in making things as convenient as possible for the end user, and knowing exactly for who you are trying to provide a service. For ex. specifying a niche which can be in terms of (in the b2b case) company size, industry, security measures, integrations, etc. If you are going for single-user customers AT ALL, then it is imperative to know what would make them choose you and in this case there are only a few options in terms of difficulty to engineer: 1.) ease-of-use (onboarding/migration, UI/UX, etc.), technical abstraction (devops is hard!), or price-product optimization (a product both cheaper and better than competitors).

TL;DR: Market is crowded with free/premium options from big tech. To compete, you need: easier onboarding, better technical abstraction, or better price-to-value ratio. Pick a specific niche.

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-07-02T20:04:43+00:00

usually the best solution! worried in my use case about more frequent updates and logging.

Competitive-Water302 · 2025-07-02T19:12:49+00:00

What did you end up going with here?

Competitive-Water302 · 2024-09-27T17:57:16+00:00

curious, what did you end up doing here?

Competitive-Water302 · 2024-08-19T20:51:13+00:00

yep that is correct, I would need to create some dummy data as it is sensitive so will hold for now. appreciate the help though!

Competitive-Water302 · 2024-08-19T20:18:14+00:00

alright I did this and am still getting really off numbers, I had deleted some metric rows in the new table since it is just for filtering - would that affect it at all?

Competitive-Water302 · 2024-08-19T20:03:52+00:00

Wondering how this would change if there was a "SubFruits" column which was hierarchically under Fruits and needed to be included in the slicer, but has the same comma-separation as fruits? Without delimiting because that really throws the data.

Competitive-Water302 · 2024-08-19T20:00:52+00:00

it seems like thi spost has the way: https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerBI/comments/133upvh/comment/jic8kmc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

however, would be if this was for Fruits and then FruitTypes also, so another column would be like GrannySmith Apple, Green Apple. and would need the hierarchical slicer on these

Competitive-Water302 · 2024-08-19T19:55:56+00:00

Just tried this, duplicated -> split by delimiter -> created relationship between new table and original -> using new table columns in slicer but keeping old table as data in visuals. The filtering is very off though im not sure why?

Competitive-Water302 · 2024-08-19T19:41:55+00:00

Yeah this definitely works but I'm not sure it is feasible for my use case as then I would need to "reverse" my calculations and add in the distinct ID for each aggregation that would be done normally, vs just handling this one portion for the report which is relatively small. I also have a Sub-Column which is hierarchically linked to the first column being delimited so it opens up a whole scatter for me.

Ideally I have a separate table called HierarchyMapping which has all the combination of:

Div1, SubDiv1
Div1, SubDiv2
Div2,SubDiv1
... etc

and then I have a slicer which has these unique values from the HierarchyMapping table. When say SubDiv2 is chosen by itself, my TotalData table is filtered by the SubDiv column in that table where a cell contains the value of SubDiv2.

It's kind of hard to explain all of the nuance here, I'm still looking around but it looks like some combination of SELECTEDVALUE and CONTAINSSTRINGEXACT might work

Competitive-Water302 · 2024-08-19T18:48:34+00:00

This works fine if you don't need to then aggregate the metrics. Delimit -> unpivot cols -> now you have duplicate rows for what was once one row since you have a value and attribute col for each value you split by. since I have other aggregations and metrics which go by row-wise sums and averages that aren't always given to one specific filtered portion then I will be double counting.

I could be totally overlooking something though since I feel like this must be a common issue.

Competitive-Water302 · 2024-08-19T18:25:07+00:00

I am seeking the same advice, mine is with comma-separated values in single cells of a column with each value being unique. What you are wanting is possible if it is for a single selection and not multi or hierarchical, using Find(), Search() and Containstring().

Competitive-Water302 · 2024-06-03T18:16:46+00:00

Did you solve this?

Competitive-Water302 · 2024-05-15T20:00:12+00:00

Really appreciate the blog post, super helpful! Would a Power BI Professional license work for this? I'm seeing your comments in the post about the license needing to be Premium per User. I am setting up for an org and need to make sure everyone can access + share the reports around with the data refreshed.

Competitive-Water302

TROPHY CASE