benbernard's comments

benbernard | 9 years ago | on: Object Spreadsheets

Interestingly, we (Fieldbook) used handsontable for a long time, but eventually found it wasn't performant enough for the size of data we had (also we just needed to be able to do more customization than we could wrangle out of it)

benbernard | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Fieldbook: Lightweight Database with a Spreadsheet UI and a REST API

Thanks! We actually have a few user success stories, and most of our templates are directly from use cases we've seen people use.

Here is a story of Data Analysis tracking sales leads: https://medium.com/@fieldbook/data-analysis-tracks-sales-lea...

And here is one about how Continuum Analytics uses us to track their professional service work: https://medium.com/@fieldbook/continuum-analytics-manages-pr...

benbernard | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Fieldbook: Lightweight Database with a Spreadsheet UI and a REST API

We definitely intend to be in this for the long haul! We will always let your data out of Fieldbook, we already support CSV downloads of any sheet or view, and we are thinking about a wide variety of export and sync options to other services / data formats.

I understand being leary of business model changes. While we can't make any guarantees in the wild world of startups, we can say that we want a free tier to remain forever, and would give plenty of warning if it were ever to change. A little more information available here: http://docs.fieldbook.com/docs/security-and-privacy

We don't currently have any short term plans for a self-hosted version.

benbernard | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Fieldbook: Lightweight Database with a Spreadsheet UI and a REST API

We want you to use Fieldbook as your database, so we don't limit the number of api calls or books you can have in Fieldbook! (we hate when you run up against an artificial limit and have to scramble to get your product back online). :)

We don't scale as far as we want to right now. For a good experience, we're limited to about 10k rows in a book. Definitely something we want to improve a LOT in the future.

More info here: http://docs.fieldbook.com/docs/data-size-limits

benbernard | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Fieldbook: Lightweight Database with a Spreadsheet UI and a REST API

We love using Fieldbook for CMS use cases. We think the public API coupled with public posts is a great fit for the API, too.

We don't handle image uploads yet. Definitely something we want to support in the future. Of course, you can put urls in the cells and build things that way... Definitely something we want to improve in the future :)

benbernard | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Fieldbook: Lightweight Database with a Spreadsheet UI and a REST API

Unfortunately we don't yet have that particular feature... But we definitely want to do something like that in the future. What are you thinking you'd use it for (we love to collect information like that for when we do implement the feature).

Obviously, using the API you could build a restricted interface on top of fieldbook, but that probably isn't what your looking for, I understand :).

We're also considering doing a mode where you can't change any of the metadata (sheets/fields) but can add/remove/change rows.

benbernard | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Fieldbook: Lightweight Database with a Spreadsheet UI and a REST API

Hey Folks!

I'm the CTO of Fieldbook, we're really proud of what we've built here. In particular, I really like our API explorer that allows you to run real node code right in the browser to explore our API. (And see our realtime updates in action on the same page). That feature is powered by Tonic (https://tonicdev.com)

Its mad fast to setup a database with a REST api with Fieldbook, and we'd love to hear what you think / what could be better / etc.

benbernard | 10 years ago | on: Show HN: Fieldbook – Create a database as easily as a spreadsheet

Greetings fellow devs! I'm the CTO of Fieldbook, happy to talk about anything. We use a node backend stack, with mongodb, and a backbone based front end. We use socketio for realtime and rabbit for some back end messaging.

I'm also one of the authors of RecordStream which has been discussed on here before (https://github.com/benbernard/RecordStream). I see Fieldbook as an extension of RecordStream but for the web instead of JSON records on the command line.

benbernard | 10 years ago | on: So Long, Reddit

I just wanted to say thanks to the author of this article (I hope they are reading this section). This post really made me think hard about reddit, and about my own personal values. I've decided, personally, to stay away from reddit because of this, and I appreciate the write up.

Maybe someday reddit will be a more inclusive place, but for now I agree with the author and will be voting with my feet, as they say.

This is not to say or imply that any of you should necessarily do the same, I think each person needs to come to their own conclusions (which can definitely be different for any number of great reasons)

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