Categories
Data analysis Local reporting Software Work

Making the Switch to Apache Superset

This is the story of how the City of Ann Arbor adopted Apache Superset as its business intelligence (BI) platform. Superset has been a superior product for both creators and consumers of our data dashboards and saves us 94% in costs compared to our prior solution.

Background

As the City of Ann Arbor’s data analyst, I spend a lot of time building charts and dashboards in our business intelligence / data visualization platform. When I started the job in 2021, we were halfway through a contract and I used that existing software as I completed my initial data reporting projects.

After using it for a year, I was feeling its pain points. Building dashboards was a cumbersome and finicky process and my customers wanted more flexible and aesthetically-pleasing results. I began searching for something better.

Being a government entity makes software procurement tricky – we can’t just shop and buy. Our prior BI platform was obtained via a long Request for Proposals (RFP) process. This time I wanted to try out products to make sure they would perform as expected. Will it work with our data warehouse? Can we embed charts in our public-facing webpages?

The desire to try before buying led me to consider open-source options as well as products that we already had access to through existing contracts (i.e., Microsoft Power BI).

Categories
Software

AntennaPod: the open-source podcast app

I still like the idea of spotlighting open-source products that deliver a superior experience while operating under a model that benefits users and society. Last month I wrote about gathio, the event planning site. You can find my musings about FOSS (free, open-source software) in that post. This one will be shorter.

The obvious choice for today would be to write about Mastodon, the decentralized open-source alternative to Twitter. I’m active on the server for Washtenaw County and I support the project on Patreon. However, a good look at the project and its features would take more time than I can muster at present.

But I got this post idea from Masto. Someone asked for recommendations for a podcast app. And as I recommended the lovely AntennaPod to yet another person, I realized I could plug it here too.

I’ve been using AntennaPod for almost a decade, since its early days. It was decent even as it was getting built out, but in the past few years it has stabilized as feature-complete and rock solid.

AntennaPod has all the features I could want in a podcast player. It’s easy to use. And it doesn’t track what I listen to or serve me ads. Period.

It’s free to use. If you try to contribute to support the project, you’ll see a slew of non-monetary options. Should you manage to find the small link to donate money, you’ll be deterred by a popup suggesting you oughtn’t:

Classy <3

So I’ll continue contributing my time and money to other open-source projects while being grateful to the folks who keep AntennaPod humming. I highly recommend it as the app to enjoy podcasts without being surveilled and/or advertised to. It’s available only for Android, not iOS.

Categories
How-to

Replace Evite and Facebook with gathio

Tl;dr – check out gath.io for making chill, inclusive, not-creepy event pages. Unlike Evite, It won’t track you or serve you Bitcoin ads.


It amazes me how a free, open-source program can outperform its proprietary, commercialized equivalents. An obvious one is R, the statistical programming language. It blows away competitors like SPSS. R is a huge project, but some great open-source projects can surpass commercial competition while remaining a single person’s side project.

It touches my heart that people build great things together, transparently, and then make them freely available. I’ve long meant to write posts where I shout out a free, open-source software (FOSS) that has improved my life materially or spiritually. I was finally spurred to write when I got an Evite yesterday, for a 7-year-old’s birthday party. I opened the link on my phone and saw:

barf

Evite has always had annoying ads and links, but this took it to the next level. I buy as little as possible from Amazon. Amazon’s bad enough. But Bitcoin?? It’s a Ponzi scheme that lures in unsuspecting saps (see the Citations Needed episode on manipulative Bitcoin/crypto/NFT advertising) and sows remarkable environmental destruction. Happy birthday, kid, here’s 0.0005 Bitcoin. Good luck spending it. (Web3 Is Going Great has you covered for crypto realism and schadenfreude).

These ads put me over the edge, but I’ve disliked Evite for years. In particular, it’s creepy that the organizer can track who has opened and viewed the invite.

And then there’s Facebook events. Because I’m not on Facebook, I sometimes forget how many events are organized there. Until someone sends me one I want to attend and I’m unable to view the info or RSVP. Argh!

Why must we engage with platforms that track us, shove ads in our faces, and sell our data in order to organize a dang birthday party or seed-swap?? Well, someone else felt the same way and did something about it. Enter: gathio!