While working at Google years ago, I co-founded a nonprofit for math enrichment classes. I ran it in my spare time, using Google Sheets, until the spreadsheet setup grew too unwieldy, time-consuming, and frustrating. Back then, I bit the bullet, and rebuilt it using Django. It took months of my evenings and weekends — just to recreate a database version of what I almost had with a spreadsheet.
That got me thinking what made spreadsheets my tool of choice to start with, and what made me switch to a database, and if we can have the best of both worlds. So we built Grist to be a “relational spreadsheet” — most of what a spreadsheet has, but with more structure, linking between records, and a flexible UI on top.
I’ve been using Grist daily, it’s now my tool of choice. I’d love to know what uses you put it to as well!
I got onboard 3 years ago right after Dmitry made a demo to me. What truly impressed me right from the beginning was the UI and how easy it was to build advanced views by simply using linking between records. To me, this plus the python formulas and the sqlite storage put together shows great potential to achieve distributed data management properly.
Note that it was even possible at that time to run Grist standalone using electron and to bring your data offline with you. It had been deprioritize and the feature had to be put on the side for a while. But it does not seem to hard to bring it back.
Right now, the spreadsheet is unworkable (formulas are updating where I don't want them to, visual editing glitches), hope you iron out the bugs.
So whenever a new form/table is created, is it getting stored within a sqlite table on your backend ?
Also could you help understand what happens behind the scenes in your backend & some best practices involved in using SQLite in backend. Like how do you mount them on to say to your backend if you are using docker/kubernetes.
