Ask HN: What do you use as the “internal admin UI”? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you use as the “internal admin UI”?

7 pointskirillrogovoy9 comments

I've been building products for many years and, most of the time, my "admin UI" would be some SQL GUI (currently Adminer with a custom plugin).

That's what I'd use to resolve support cases, change some data for the customers when it's absent from the real UI, etc.

Usually, there's just no time to build internal admin apps when you're a solo founder or a small team.

However, I'm not really happy with this way of doing things. There's no "global search", no place to attach notes, and often it's hard to jump to related records (e.g. client -> client's transactions) quickly.

As I'd run the SQL GUI locally, it's always hard to share links to some records with my team, other than in the form of screenshots.

The list of problems goes on and on.

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Hence it prompted this question. What do you use? How do you debug data issues? How do you help customers? How do you share links (whatever form they take) to data with your team and collaborate?

> Usually, there's just no time to build internal admin apps when you're a solo founder or a small team.

At my current job, the "admin UI" is rolled into the same CRM we present to our customers, and often takes the form of e.g. additional panels on customer-facing pages that are only visible to admin users. In my opinion, this design was a mistake because it means we have to go to considerable lengths to make internal tools visually polished, despite them often being used by just one or two users who (a) work for us and therefore don't need any polish and (b) we can directly brief on how to perform a particular task.

At a previous job, the customer-facing CRM was as polished as you'd like but the admin tools were kept separate and, as a kind of informal company policy, were often deliberately designed to be _brutally_ simple. Black text on white background, no CSS, no Javascript except maybe for a JQuery plugin thrown onto a table to make it sortable. In some cases where we felt it was justified, we'd even just dump JSON onto a page and train the operator to CTRL+F to find the field they were interested in. Admin tools that were used by more users would receive slightly more effort, but the whole point was to keep these tools as simple and unpolished as they could possibly be while still being functional so the bulk of the devteam's time could be spent on customer-facing code. While this was an extreme contrast to my current job, I nevertheless find this approach a better use of the devteam's time. And as a bonus, it meant the friction to putting together a new admin app was much lower. If one or two of the admin users felt that they were being slowed down by an awkward workflow, it was entirely uncontroversial for the devs to throw together a quick microapp just for those users. If we'd had to do it by putting together an API with a React frontend and everything that goes along with that, we probably would have rejected most of those requests.

Well it really depends of the stack.

You probably heard of phpMyAdmin. There are many different product depending on which stack you're dealing with.

Personally nowadays I'd just make a copy of production or whichever env has the issue, try replicate locally. For that I mostly use SequelAce.

You can share the SQL queries and the results as CSV to insert in tickets and such. Screenshots are not great indeed. You could export what you want to share to a blank db. If sharing is such an important aspect, look at products such as phpMyAdmin for whichever stack you're using, you can share deep links of the admin which is essentially a search result.

In my experience and the projects I worked with too much time is spent for custom backoffice / CMS. Retool is seems like a super power, but it's almost impossible to get buy in for that if some custom solution is already in place. Regardless how much (over) time is spent maintaining that custom solution.

I've been using Retool recently for most of our team's internal dashboards and it almost feels like a super power -- able to stand up a usable UI for our non-technical customer success team in an hour or two

Any downsides?

Have you found any limitations to this?

Laraval Nova is pretty great if you already know PHP.

Tables are almost free to show and have CRUD around them.

Metrics / Charts are easy to display.

https://nova.laravel.com/

Nova is one of the reasons I picked Lavarel for my next product. Laravel as a framework is pretty good but the ability to add commercially supported things like payments and dashboards with almost no effort was the tie breaker for me!

Our company is using the full .net stack, so a .net compatible framework was just a natural choice. We went with radzen.io . It's ok and fullfills the deeds.

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