Astrato Hackathon: Innovating and improving our features for you!

 

Hackathon: An opportunity to challenge team dev skills – creating, playing, testing and sharing cool new ideas in a limitless environment!

So, to fast-track the evolution of our cloud-native platform, we recently held a 5-day hackathon (an intense sprint where programmers and others involved in the dev process collaborate on software projects). The purpose – to focus the team’s time and effort on achievable product enhancements. And for you, that means the rapid development of new features and improvements that help you better solve your (or the end-user’s) business problems!

And here are a few of the highlights from the teams that participated.

From our Developer teams

For our dev teams, this was a fun way to explore new ideas within Astrato and learn new skills too. How did they participate? The hackathon was open to anyone to submit topic ideas. So, after agreeing on what each tribe would pick up during the hackathon, the tribes started ideating with their Product Managers.

What were they aiming for? Delivering cool new features, exploring new topics, or even building a proof of concept (POC) for a potential brand new addition to Astrato!

Here are two of the many extraordinary solutions they devised:

Slider filter

Get ready for another feature that will make data exploration even simpler for everyone that works with data – the Slider filter. Select between ranges of numbers or dates effortlessly, exactly as you would with everyday website sliders! More familiarity and ease of use! Nice one, devs.

Animations/Transitions

This new Animations/Transitions feature is both fun and practical. See what really changed in your data! Distinguish new and existing values that have been modified, or removed from the updated dataset. Insights at a glance with the power of visuals! Now that’s what we like to see!

Trellis / Tiles

Repeat groups of visualizations in Astrato while splitting them by a dimension – for a super-effective and quick comparison!

Maps

Visualize real-time geospatial data in Snowflake using a map! A proof-of-concept that allows for interactivity combining mapping with visuals for advanced insights. 🌎

Embeddability & Public availability

View Workbooks and individual visualizations without having to log in first. Perfect for public-facing data or websites! That means you can include live-query charts powered by Astrato on your website.

Exports

• Export sheet to PDF
• Need to quickly turn your Workbook into a PDF report or take it with you on-the-go, or even print later at the office? We’ve got you covered!

• Export data and formatted tables to XLSX.
  • Enables optional export of both formatted tables (to match how they look in Astrato) and standard export of other visualizations. In the future, this will be a complementary addition to the existing Export CSV feature available in the Workbook Editor

Data-driven text object

Create real living and breathing stories in your dashboard and describe scenarios in real-time.

Data view editor enhancements

• Import/export
• Potential to backup and commit changes to DVE scripts

Other cool updates

• Adding Snowflake TIME TRAVEL capability to Queries
  • See results as they were in the past – rewind your data!
• Postgres support
  • Another data source we’re adding soon!

From our Industry Solutions team

The Industry Solutions (IS) team help our development teams understand the needs and expectations of our users. And here’s how they joined in the Astrato Hackathon:

• Working with the graphic designers and software developers to understand the requirements of the projects they were tackling in the hackathon – asking questions, and sharing ideas and example use cases.
• Running their own sprint – focusing on the Astrato Object Templates and Sheet Layouts. They researched dashboard UX design and useful KPI designs for creating compelling visualizations.

The main benefit they were aiming for – helping Astrato users quickly design eye-catching, pixel-perfect data visualizations! Here are two examples from their team.

KPIs

“Advanced KPI designs often contain multiple objects that are grouped to highlight the important indicators of the identified metric. Usually, they also include a number, comparison, and over time chart,” Joe, our Head of Industry Solutions, explained. Then he put his spin on it.

A simple KPI lacks the context that delivers the “so what?” to the intended audience. Including amplifying information gets the message across with more context and visual attention. And on the other hand, advanced KPI designs can be tedious to design.

The solution… in Astrato, you can leverage the Object Template to save your KPI or other groups of objects and use them over and over again! Nice!

Sheet templates

Next up, Emily, our Senior Solutions Architect, tackled layouts. “Dashboard design requires time, resources, and multiple design iterations,” Emily shared. Bringing together charts to tell your data story can be simplified using design templates.

A sheet template takes the guesswork out of your dashboard. No need to research coordinating colors or finesse object alignment. With Astrato, you let our expert team do all that for you!

How is all that possible? Well, connecting your Snowflake data to Astrato only takes a few seconds. So why shouldn’t your dashboard design be just as simple? Astrato’s Sheet Templates enable users to create eye-catching dashboards without the UX/UI research and design iterations. Here is one of the NEW templates coming soon!

 

Disclaimer – We’re proud of what our colleagues in development have accomplished. These features and capabilities may or may not end up in the product depending on development schedules and quality.

 

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