I led design and front-end engineering at Rill. I designed, prototyped, and built Rill Developer, our local-first tool for transforming and exploring data in SQL, and the new Rill dashboard along with the reactive, composable charting system behind all of its visualization. Later I managed the team that shipped Rill Cloud, a hosted version of the dashboard.
Highlights
- Rill Developer. Designed, prototyped, built, and marketed our local-first, self-serve data transformation and analytics product. It’s open source: github.com/rilldata/rill.
- Rill dashboard. Designed and built the new Rill dashboard, including a reactive, composable charting system that powers all of our visualization.
- Rill Cloud. Managed a team of application engineers to release a cloud-hosted version of the dashboard.
- Brand and vision. Collaborated with the founders on product vision, brand values, and marketing.
- Company culture. Introduced “working in the open” and open-sourced our stack, set up a regular release train, built a new engineering hiring process and a proposal-based writing culture, and mentored engineers.
The dashboard
Rebuilding Rill’s dashboard meant tailoring the visualizations to the application itself, and making them flexible enough to do things most data viz libraries, like Vega, can’t. So I built the chart system from the ground up: DuckDB queries on the server feeding a composable data-graphics system. Doing it all yourself has real tradeoffs ~ you have to sweat every single detail ~ and I wouldn’t always recommend it, but it let me ship an API and component set that do things people aren’t used to, in a way that feels intrinsic to the application.
