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The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

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Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#111

Post by howinteresting »

Accacin wrote: post #99
vlovich123 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See the other comment about the Dutch dashboard. Covid data isn’t changing that quickly. Having the frontend render something more static simplifies the design. No sql queries are even needed and you don’t need to scale out your database.

Well the Dutch site takes much longer to load. All these comments are (rightfully) discussing the back end being incredibly over-engineered, but 99% of people do not care about that. They care about how quickly a page loads, which the gov.uk site does much better. I guess that implies that using Next for a "static site" is not a great idea.

https://coronadashboard.rijksoverheid.nl loads in less than a second on my Pixel 6.

Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#112

Post by dwohnitmok »

mmcnl wrote: post #106
Accacin wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that using Next for a static site is just as over engineered, personally.

I disagree. Expressing your frontend layout as code is not over engineering at all imo. It makes it easier to re-use code and is great for testability. Next is perfect for this use case. I actually think the code is quite elegant too. It's open source, so don't take my word for it, but have a look for yourself: https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-data-dashboard/tree/dev... .

> Expressing your frontend layout as code is not over engineering at all imo

What do you mean by this? Isn't all frontend layout expressed as code?

Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#113

Post by wnolens »

jll29 wrote: post #62

It's funny to read about a dashboard with TBs of memory and distributed DBs when on HN, people pride themselves on getting Web servers to run on floppy disk based systems. Joking aside, I liked the description of the dashboard, and generally speaking the UK's government Web sites are better quality, support open data more, are easier to read and navigate than other European countries from what I have seen. This inclu…

> The most mysterious part for me was why one would put JSON inside relational tables?

Cheap and easy way to permit a flexible schema for some part of the data. Performance tests probably showed that for their specific query workload, any slow down from parsing/lack of index was fine.

Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#114

Post by tjungblut »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #32
tjungblut wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK isn't part of the EU anymore.

Maybe GP has edited their comment, but it says "Hey Europe" and we are very definitely still part of Europe.

Indeed it was edited, it said EU before. Europe makes even less sense, there is no centralized public procurement in all of Europe.

Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#115

Post by aembleton »

rob_c wrote: post #91
amelius wrote: post #3

I would have preferred to see it implemented as a spreadsheet in the cloud.

The data is exportable but you then have to deal with 8MB+ csv files. Still it's better than it being in docx I suppose... But then this would let you perform statistical analyses on _their_ data, I'm not sure they're such a big fan of that...

What format would you prefer it to be in than CSV? There are CSV libraries in pretty much every language and any spreadsheet can import them. 8MB really isn't that hard to handle these days.

Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#117

Post by tinus_hn »

mmcnl wrote: post #43
trebligdivad wrote: post #5

I do wonder if the power of a distributed database is really needed here; it gets ~1 update a day, so there's no need to have clever consistency stuff. Most of the queries relate to either today's data (you open the map and zoom in to see how doomed your area is today), or the graphs showing a standard set of history (e.g. cases over the last year). You'd think you could extract that data to be static and not require…

I agree. For example, the Dutch corona dashboard (coronadashboard.rijksoverheid.nl) is a statically rendered dashboard using Next that gets updated daily. No backend and it's super fast. Maybe I'm not objective because I'm Dutch myself, but from both a user-facing and technical perspective I think the Dutch dashboard is by far the best corona dashboard in the world. It's very fast, has a lot of detailed visualization…

It looks really nice. Unfortunately it turns out the main feature, the data, is phony.

https://dvhn.nl/groningen/Meer-ziekenhuispati%C3%ABnten-blij...

When the hospitals feel like it, they test patients that are already in the hospital for something else if they have COVID. And when they don’t feel like it, they don’t. Any patient found to have COVID, is added to the graph. So these numbers, and also derived numbers such as the R value, are statistically useless and vulnerable to manipulation.

Re: The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard

#118

Post by mmcnl »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #112
mmcnl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Expressing your frontend layout as code is not over engineering at all imo. It makes it easier to re-use code and is great for testability. Next is perfect for this use case. I actually think the code is quite elegant too. It's open source, so don't take my word for it, but have a look for yourself: https://github.com/minvws/nl-covid19-data-dashboard/tree/dev... .

> Expressing your frontend layout as code is not over engineering at all imo What do you mean by this? Isn't all frontend layout expressed as code?

HTML is not code imo. With React (and thus Next) you can treat your frontend code as full-fledged functions and objects.
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