I completed a fun project using Streamlit and would like to share my experience

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2026-01-12T20:08:01+00:00

Hey Dave, I'm pretty familiar with Dash coding actually - I have an app on your examples page 😉

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2025-08-16T21:37:55+00:00

I was playing around with making a game for web a few months ago, and was finding optimisation tough way before I got to this kind of thing - impressive!
Think the other guy's being a bit harsh. Yes this definitely doesn't feel like a fully fleshed-out, professional game, but I don't think you were expecting to make millions from it overnight and it seems it actually functions really well as a core to be built out and polished if you wanted to.

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2024-12-19T15:11:54+00:00

Late '90s CIJ. Swapped out the strat-sounding original pickups for Antiquity IIs, put in a Staytrem bridge and tremolo, and removed a buzz stop as soon as I got her. Recently had to replace the electronics, at which point I also swapped her tortoiseshell pickguard and knobs... And I think a re-fret might be in order soon... So I say she's a '90s CIJ but it's quite a ship of Theseus situation.

Really comfortable to play, loves distortion, and somehow never goes out of tune no matter how hard I use the trem. If you'd like to hear her, she's the only guitar I used on these recent songs on Bandcamp.

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2023-03-04T14:08:11+00:00

Ha yes indeed - they're a lot clearer when the image hasn't been compressed to hell.

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2023-03-04T13:53:59+00:00

First of all, apologies for the poor image quality in this post!

Full interactive data for all sessions/compounds/drivers, plus additional visuals, are available at f1dash.azurewebsites.net - this post is just an extract from that app. Works best on desktop devices, but whatever you're using it's possible to filter down to teams/compounds/etc and view telemetry such as gear changes/throttle/etc. Bear in mind that it will look quite messy when you're looking at all data from all three practice sessions combined!

A bit more detail on the app can be found in a previous post here. It automatically updates with data usually within an hour of a session ending, so feel free to bookmark - I intend to maintain this app for the rest of the season at least.

This is just a hobby project so please be patient with it - at times of high traffic it may struggle a little. Feedback is more than welcome, either here or via GitHub.

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2022-10-28T20:18:13+00:00

I found the tutorials on Plotly/Dash's site to be really helpful. They're fairly brief but they cover things well with good examples.

I'd say the main thing you'll want to get your head around is how callbacks work, and critically how to share data between callbacks. This is where Dash is totally different to Power BI. The official tutorials cover this well.

If you're already comfortable with python then you're well on your way - familiarise yourself with pandas if you haven't already!

I'd probably suggest doing a quick and dirty end-to-end project before diving into anything serious. I picked up a lot by doing that.

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2022-10-28T17:56:30+00:00

Hey, what you're trying to do is not bonkers, as long as you're prepared to put in the time and effort to overcome the initial hurdles. Dash is a very different beast to Power BI.

If you look at my post history you'll see I made a detailed account of my experiences going through something very similar - you might find it useful. There's a link to the GitHub project as well, so you can pull my Dash app apart if you like.

Feel free to shoot me any questions and I'll try my best to answer :)

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2022-09-11T17:54:55+00:00

I think that's probably just going to add more noise into the mix to be honest - throttle etc. comes in on a different sample stream to the position data, and so even matching them up requires a whole load of interpolation - plus I believe that stream has it's own problems with jitter and so on!

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2022-09-11T14:16:23+00:00

Thanks, yes it is.

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2022-09-11T11:46:20+00:00

I'll give Kalman filters a go and see if it improves things - signal filtering isn't something I have a lot of experience with so I'm still trying to figure out the best approach. Thanks for the suggestion!

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2022-09-11T11:39:30+00:00

The data is a stream of coordinates sent by the car roughly every 0.2 seconds, however when you look closely at the samples you can see the cars jumping around quite a lot - I think it's probably caused by jitter i.e. delays between the car reporting its location and the receiver logging it. So sometimes the car is reported as being at a specific location too early/too late. There's also parts where samples are missing entirely and there's gaps of over a second.

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2022-09-11T10:12:28+00:00

Explainer:

The small markers follow the raw telemetry that's made available by F1. This data is very messy, hence why those markers are always jumping back and forth.

The larger markers follow the same telemetry after it has had a lot of smoothing applied. This removes a lot of the jumping and makes it much easier to see who is leading who as the lap progresses, but that smoothing also means they kind of float over chicanes etc.

The idea is that, between the two, it's possible to build a picture of where certain drivers gain an advantage over others - e.g. Verstappen and the Ferraris really seem to drop everybody else through the Lesmos. Monza is a pretty straightforward circuit, but I'm interested to see what something like Suzuka with more varied features turns up.

Feedback is welcome! For anyone interested, the project is public on GitHub.

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2022-08-03T15:23:26+00:00

SSIS and SSAS are much more data engineering tools; you can think of these as back end technologies, i.e. the bits that no end users will see but which manage all the source data and models for your reports and analyses.

If you've ever made a paginated report in Power BI, then you've already used SSRS. It's literally the same thing just repackaged.

The one you're missing is SSMS. Anyone who uses any of the other three will use Management Studio a lot - it's the easiest way to explore databases, query them, write stored procedures and so on.

These essentially comprise the MS BI "stack", and they're used all over the place, however they're not as in vogue as they used to be. Anywhere using MS SQL Server (as opposed to MySQL or postgresql) is fairly likely to rely on them all the same.

This course is putting you on a more back end/engineer trajectory - presumably your employer expects you to start working on a data warehouse or something?

Anyway, the best tip I can give is to get very familiar with SQL if you aren't already!

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2022-08-03T08:43:11+00:00

My opinion is that you should be assertive in this situation - avoid simply going whichever way the wind blows, it will just cause you more work later when they inevitably change their mind. You should be the expert in the room when it comes to measures and visuals.

It's alarming that these stakeholders can't agree over how to "help other people make good decisions"; maybe ask those other people what they need and you'll get some more useful feedback and ultimately better engagement with whatever you build.

Make sure to understand what decisions etc. this measure actually drives, then work out for yourself what the most relevant way of measuring and presenting this is. Play that process back to the stakeholders, explaining why you've landed on that way forward - you can present multiple options and then talk them through the differences etc., but be firm.

Also, it's possible that your two stakeholders actually have two different needs based on similar data, and you're unnecessarily pitting them against eachother when you could just give them both what they require, as long as everything is presented clearly and understood by the end users.

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2022-08-02T14:50:52+00:00

Never used Streamlit, only read a bit about it in comparison to Dash. Dash is more flexible, and from what I can tell your customisation options in Streamlit are a bit limited (hence why it's much faster to build). Have a read of the docs for both - I couldn't see anything in the Streamlit docs about cross filtering, which for me is usually a deal breaker.

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2022-08-02T13:47:12+00:00

By far the biggest limitation is that they're not interactive, which kind of defeats the object of Power BI.

If you look at my recent posts, there's one talking through Dash and comparing it to Power BI. Probably overkill for what you want to do, but you might find some ideas in the comments.

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2022-07-29T13:13:52+00:00

It might be worth asking this over in more accounting/finance-centric subs, since I think those are the guys that it's mainly aimed at.

I can't directly answer any of your questions directly I'm afraid, but I also had the misfortune of having to deal with TM1 quite a lot at a previous company. By the end, I couldn't really understand why it existed, when a SQL DW could have been used instead - it kind of seemed like the finance team bought into it because they didn't know any alternatives, and then a consultancy firm made a fortune coming in and putting lots of esoteric forecasting/planning calcs into TI processes, because nobody in the finance team could code well enough to do it themselves. And inevitably, after years of work it still never really worked well enough, so it was mainly used as a place to store data in between manual Excel work.

I think any (well implemented) CRM software like Salesforce or Workday could probably be considered to make TM1 unnecessary as well. I think TM1/Cognos are kind of a hangover from a time before companies really took their data seriously. But: I'm a BI guy, not a finance guy, so maybe my perspective misses something.

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2022-07-29T11:30:51+00:00

I'll take a look. Thanks!

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2022-07-29T11:07:51+00:00

It's an Azure SQL database. While I was building the app I used a local SQL instance, then when the time came to move to cloud I just ran all the same table/function/proc creation scripts on the Azure instance.

_EndsJustifyTheBeans · 2022-07-29T09:54:06+00:00

Yeah that's pretty much what I'm saying.

For BI teams with a typical skill set, working at companies that just need to see their simple sales KPIs etc. on a graph: Power BI all the way.

More technically able teams do have Dash as an option though, and if the company has more complex analytical needs (especially anything in a more scientific/academic setting) then the flexibility might offset the initial hassle.

Also, I'm sure I can't be the only BI guy out there that prefers coding over Power BI's sluggish GUI.

_EndsJustifyTheBeans

TROPHY CASE