> It seems to me like a bit of googling and >90% of the work here could have been avoided.
I had a deadline and the only idea on the team for shipping a working product, and I shipped a working product on time.
Uber ran (runs?) their own data center. Getting a Windows machine/VM procured to actually run Excel would have taken an act of god. I was able to spin up a new front-end service in about thirty minutes. And I had some code that sort of kind of already worked, so I wasn't starting from scratch. Keep in mind that this system needed to be used by multiple people with different sets of data simultaneously.
> Are you really going to build and maintain a full blown Excel clone in JS? Is this really the objective of the frontend team?
If they'd have kept asking for more features and Excel parity, I suppose we would have considered it. But they didn't.
Certainly I don't expect many people would have chosen to do what I did. But the thing worked (and surprisingly well). If all you took away from the post is that it was a big complicated project, I'm afraid my writing has failed to convey the message it was attempting to convey.
A little over ten years ago I worked in the Excel Services team that makes the consumer-visible Excel Web App and also the SharePoint-integrated Excel Services product (server side processing accessible via API or web UI).
I loved seeing the genuine joy our PMs had whenever they found an honest to goodness calc bug and could get it reproduced and fixed in The State Machine. It was also a delight to see the web app approach parity with the desktop client experience -- we got to listen to a wide swath of users and build out the stuff we thought would be most useful to the most folks. And I loved our group PM's insight about what the heck Excel could be good for versus purpose built BI tools, other web sheet apps, pure SQL, etc.
This is a very fun kind of product to create and it's awesome that you were able to ship it in a way people could use!
I had a deadline and the only idea on the team for shipping a working product, and I shipped a working product on time.
Uber ran (runs?) their own data center. Getting a Windows machine/VM procured to actually run Excel would have taken an act of god. I was able to spin up a new front-end service in about thirty minutes. And I had some code that sort of kind of already worked, so I wasn't starting from scratch. Keep in mind that this system needed to be used by multiple people with different sets of data simultaneously.
> Are you really going to build and maintain a full blown Excel clone in JS? Is this really the objective of the frontend team?
If they'd have kept asking for more features and Excel parity, I suppose we would have considered it. But they didn't.
Certainly I don't expect many people would have chosen to do what I did. But the thing worked (and surprisingly well). If all you took away from the post is that it was a big complicated project, I'm afraid my writing has failed to convey the message it was attempting to convey.