Is there anything in the backend arena that a small business couldn’t do with an excel spreadsheet?
That might sound like I’m making fun of productivity software, but I’m not—-now that instant communication is a commodity, organizational/productivity software has value mostly because it’s a self-limiting tool that shapes how we think and interact so we can do what we were already capable of doing.
I recently wrote my first piece of productivity software, which I use everyday. The main benefit I get out of it is reminding myself, “This structure is how I want to think about things.”
The unlimited freedom of a spreadsheet comes with downsides, at least for me.
The big downside to emacs for productivity is that it’s less easy to share.
Excel is great for ad-hoc exploration (is kind of a different repl!) but is best AT THE END of the data pipeline.
To make it well rounded, you need a good storage (rdbms), data language (sql, or hopefully my lang someday!), good way to do entry (CRUD form builder).
And at the end, put a spreadsheet and/or interactive repl like Jupiter.
More fancy stuff is welcome but this is the definition of a well rounded tool useful for small business.
----
My wife applied to residency last year. Each specialty has these giant spreadsheets (just like a database) they maintain collectively. which places are giving out interviews, how experiences were, what to look for, chat, questions, etc?
These are 20+ page spreadsheets. I briefly worked on an app for helping put this in a better format (spreadsheets suck on mobile). It's a ton of work just to match the basic functionality of this document.