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Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

rowzero.io

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Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#71

Post by dustingetz »

layer8 wrote: post #67
dustingetz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies like to own data in a shared drive on a network. Do they actually like that? Or is that the weight of 30—no, 50—years of legacy momentum? shuffling files around is the worst part of knowledge work! pseudo-files are the worst part of Google Docs, i want a unified graph!

The benefit of files is that they are a consistent, application-independent abstraction. You can copy, move, rename, backup, version, and generally organize them however you want, restrict or grant access, without being constrained by what the respective application supports. Importantly, you can organize files from different applications together without those applications having to know anything about each other. H…

> files are consistent and application-independent

I see diverse, inhomogenous state schemas that are deeply coupled to the originating application (internal data structures serialized to disk!) and have arbitrary legacy structural constraints ("document") as well as seams between application silos

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#72

Post by breckognize »

chadash wrote: post #61
breckognize wrote: post #2

Founder/CEO here. When I worked in AWS S3, I spent a lot of time in Excel. Even as a dev, it was the fastest way to explore data, build models, and share forecasts with business partners. My Excel usage was plagued by slow performance, poor cloud integration, and no first-class Python support. I loved the richness and responsiveness of Excel, but I had to give up too much power to get it. This felt like a false choic…

What I'd love to see is an easy workflow to make this supplant Google docs. Right now, let's say i want a shared spreadsheet. I need to: 1) Signup for an account 2) Create a workbook 3) Click share and put in friend's email 4) They get an invite 5) Now they need to sign up 6) They can edit my doc I'm not a paying customer (or even a user... I just heard of this), so take this with a grain of salt, but what I'd love t…

After you create a workbook, click the checkbox under Share > Anyone with link can view. Then your friend doesn't need to create an account.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#73

Post by sidcool »

gamegoblin wrote: post #37
orliesaurus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell us about the stack you're using to build this. Also the biggest tech challenges you've faced and solved? But most importantly, does your family still use Google Spreadsheets?

Google Sheets is banned in our households, we planned our neighborhood block party in Row Zero! Tech stack: Everything runs on AWS Frontend: TypeScript + some Rust compiled to WASM, our own virtualized custom canvas magic Backend: Rust, Apache Arrow The biggest tech challenges... where to start. 1. As with any editor application, Undo/Redo is devilishly hard 2. A spreadsheet is modeled as a Directed Acyclic Graph whe…

How is the data modelled and persisted? What database and how is conflict handled? CRDT?

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#75

Post by dustingetz »

airstrike wrote: post #58
dustingetz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies like to own data in a shared drive on a network. Do they actually like that? Or is that the weight of 30—no, 50—years of legacy momentum? shuffling files around is the worst part of knowledge work! pseudo-files are the worst part of Google Docs, i want a unified graph!

I agree 100%, but you still need to give them the option so they can transition from legacy to next-gen And we still haven't talked about keyboard navigation!

Ok, you're right – i don't think a smooth transition is possible in the office market – but I also don't think you can disrupt Office from within. Example: the thing that disrupted the New York Times was not a better newspaper, rather Facebook

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#76

Post by sidcool »

ozim wrote: post #33
skadamat wrote: post #14

Honestly, I'm really excited about this next generation of spreadsheet software. - Causal.app - Rows.com - Equals.com - and at least 50 others I've found I'm waiting for someone to create a really high performant spreadsheet engine that runs in WASM to power even more spreadsheet-y applications. The direct manipulation of spreadsheets is super underrated.

I just wonder how come there is market for these when Microsoft has Excel online. Any company that has O365 has Excel online as well.

Excel online is not a pleasant experience. Google sheets is much better. Row zero seems way better.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#78

Post by fakedang »

Terretta wrote: post #70
breckognize wrote: post #2

Founder/CEO here. When I worked in AWS S3, I spent a lot of time in Excel. Even as a dev, it was the fastest way to explore data, build models, and share forecasts with business partners. My Excel usage was plagued by slow performance, poor cloud integration, and no first-class Python support. I loved the richness and responsiveness of Excel, but I had to give up too much power to get it. This felt like a false choic…

Starting from a place of "I want to start providing this to my employees yesterday"... I can't see how to adopt this at an info-sec minded financial services firm that would otherwise love to pay you for it. For example, the docs show the product wants static creds for a Postgres database or signed URL for S3 bucket instead of leveraging best-practice service-to-service identity and access management. Maybe you suppo…

Honestly, is it possible to decouple AWS from the app?

>I can't see how to adopt this at an info-sec minded financial services firm that would otherwise love to pay you for it.

Else this applies for us too.

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#79

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

breckognize wrote: post #2

Founder/CEO here. When I worked in AWS S3, I spent a lot of time in Excel. Even as a dev, it was the fastest way to explore data, build models, and share forecasts with business partners. My Excel usage was plagued by slow performance, poor cloud integration, and no first-class Python support. I loved the richness and responsiveness of Excel, but I had to give up too much power to get it. This felt like a false choic…

Can you make it a desktop application?

Re: Show HN: We built the fastest spreadsheet

#80

Post by gamegoblin »

sidcool wrote: post #73
gamegoblin wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Sheets is banned in our households, we planned our neighborhood block party in Row Zero! Tech stack: Everything runs on AWS Frontend: TypeScript + some Rust compiled to WASM, our own virtualized custom canvas magic Backend: Rust, Apache Arrow The biggest tech challenges... where to start. 1. As with any editor application, Undo/Redo is devilishly hard 2. A spreadsheet is modeled as a Directed Acyclic Graph whe…

How is the data modelled and persisted? What database and how is conflict handled? CRDT?

We use Apache Arrow data format, so it's fairly columnar. We have built some custom layers on top of Arrow as well to handle some fancier data types.

For storage and orchestration we use S3 and Dynamo.

Yes exactly, we use CRDTs for multiplayer stuff.

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