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Firetable – Spreadsheet-like UI for Firestore

by anindha on 9/30/20, 1:39 AM with 51 comments

  • by hardwaresofton on 9/30/20, 6:05 AM

    For those who aren't necessarily familiar with "Firestore" (I'd heard of Firebase but didn't know what Firestore was): https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore

    > Use our flexible, scalable NoSQL cloud database [called Firestore] to store and sync data for client- and server-side development.

    Getting back to what the actual post was about, my first instinct is to find out a way to replace Firebase/Firestore as a dependency of Firetable though -- does anyone know of any API-compatible replacements for Firebase with pluggable backends (minio[0] is to S3 as <something> is to Firebase/Firestore).

    I also... kind of think this might be good tech to spin a whole SaaS out of. It'd be unthinkable to try and compete with Airtable if I had to build their frontend but... hosting a database, giving access to shared/private instances of firetable, and trying to out-maneuver (or just undercut) airtable seems like it might not be a completely fool's errand.

    [0]: https://min.io/

  • by koopuluri on 9/30/20, 10:03 AM

    Beautiful. Our entire back-end is powered by FireStore and the admin UI is... lacking. We've been writing custom scripts and were even planning to build a bare-boned web app to easily let us perform certain actions without having to run a script.

    Adding / editing in the Firebase admin UI is also time consuming.

    The spreadsheet abstraction feels effective. I'm really looking forward to playing around with this.

    (Also, seems like there's some confusion about the Firestore reference: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore).

    I wouldn't quite compare this with Airtable because even thought the abstraction may look the same, the audience is very different: FireStore's audience is technical, while only a small fraction of Airtable's is technical, which leads to a different set of product priorites and likely a very different long-term roadmap.

  • by pgt on 9/30/20, 10:03 AM

    I loved using Firebase & Firestore to build MVPs, but I would advise anyone tempted to use it, to avoid it. Every time I've embraced it, I ended up having to rewrite apps shortly thereafter. Your app becomes unavoidably coupled to it.

  • by input_sh on 9/30/20, 7:01 AM

    I'm honestly really excited by this. Airtable transformed my spreadsheet experience, and I've long wished for something I can self host locally to be able to store more sensitive data (like bank statements).

  • by namanyayg on 9/30/20, 8:04 AM

    I'm still confused by what usecases Airtable or this has. Are there any for project management/app design and dev that can't be done by Trello/Notion?

  • by stephen_cagle on 10/1/20, 3:52 AM

    I recently took a look at glideapps.com which I thought was quite cool. It really surprised me how much of an app you can build with nothing more than a spreadsheet. This seems similar.

  • by neximo64 on 9/30/20, 7:59 AM

    Whats the table library used here?

  • by cnaut on 9/30/20, 5:05 PM

    So this was something built internally inside a VC firm and then opensourced?

  • by anindha on 9/30/20, 8:28 AM

    This is open source under Apache-2.0 License.

  • by krimpenrik on 9/30/20, 11:05 AM

    Will definitely try this

  • by SeriousM on 9/30/20, 6:01 AM

    Firetable, not Airtable