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Comment by snickmy | Hacker News Reader

It looks likes this is a chromium/proton wrapper around a webapp. Is that correct? The plot lib used seems very similar to plotly.

I'd be very curious to hear about some of the tech stack design choices. I'd be also interested to understand who's your target user.

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Very close, it uses Electron! Front-end is written in ReactJs. The plot library is react-vis currently, but we're replacing that soon. All the zoom/pan logic we implemented ourselves. Backend is a completely separate process. We've chosen for this architecture as it gives us the flexibility to easily change from desktop product to a web/server product, if we feel like that would be a better fit :) Target users can be very broad and is something we are still figuring out, but at the moment we see that engineers that have to deal with data from tests or simulations are a good fit for Marple.

Do you plan to commit back to the community your extra graph UX/UI. They look very neat and I don't think it will jeopardize the success of your startup. The reason why I asked about the usage of Electron (or similar) is because they are well known to be resource hungry. Slack went down that route and found themself in a pickle. Considering you are also doing a lot of data manipulation in memory (I assume) this might be very expensive on a React Stack. Anyway, something to keep in mind, don't worry about it right now.

If you are going after individual contributor, I'd spend quite some time figuring out good integration points (ie.: Notebooks), so you are better integrated in their workflow. I'd avoid going enterprise, because date warehouse and data visualization are well solved problem (both in SaaS and PaaS flavor). Source: I led data organization at mid/big companies.

(Mbaert his comment, but his account is throttled) We were worried about the performance of Electron as well. All data intensive work is done in a separate process, once in react/electron no data manipulation is needed anymore. So far it works quite ok, performance upgrades we find in electron usually don't have anything to do with the data.

Thank you for the info, we're still finding our position in the market. Figuring out the perfect use case and integration in a certain workflow will be key indeed! Feel free to contact us in private if you like to discuss more in detail about your experiences, we'd love to hear more :)

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