Getting started, and initial problems

1

There might be a lot to unpack in this post, but I’ll try to keep it manageable.

Some background and context

I’m currently employed by SIGN Fracture Care International – it’s a 501©(3) non-profit that manufactures surgical implants and provides training to orthopedic surgeons in the developing world.

I came across Metabase a few days ago while looking for an open source solution similar to Periscope, and this project is exactly what I’ve been wanting. Frankly, this is better than anything I could’ve hoped for! I’m pretty new to the company, and it’s been a Sisyphean task to chip away at some staggering technological debt. I’ve wanted to move away from ‘reports’ for a while, and to empower our semi-technical users to query our datasets in a simple way, without having to rely on IT to make queries/reports as a roundabout way of getting the data they need. ‘Dashboards’ and ‘Questions’ are most (all?) of what our users need.

Our mission is to provide equality of fracture care, worldwide – I’m not a surgeon, but I can assist with ‘healing’ software :slight_smile:

Docker and Metabase

I was excited to see Metabase on DockerHub, and I was able to get a proof of concept running nearly instantly… but then the problems started…

Being naive, I figured that metabase/metabase:latest was the latest stable release, but I ran into an issue that had been marked as resolved (https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/855). Then I ran into another problem (https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/5276); I was told it couldn’t be reproduced, and that it might have been fixed in a later release, but then I found this issue with the current :latest release on DockerHub (https://github.com/metabase/metabase/issues/5280).

I’m very new to this project, and there’s so much that I don’t know, but I’m trying to get up to speed. I even tried with metabase/metabase-head, and building a Docker image from scratch, but the issues persist.

So what?

I want to solve the problems I need to solve, and I want to help in any way that I can – that’s why I’m at this company, that’s why I chose my field.

I’d appreciate any pointers, and I expect to help contribute to the betterment of this project. For starters, I need to figure out this development stack, and how to easily make/test changes. If someone beats me to implementation, good for them. Regardless, I’m here to help; I get paid to make our organization run as efficiently as possible, and we have a culture that values giving.

The lower we keep our costs, the better our tools, the more we can do… I’ve noticed there are plenty of ways to help, and this project is something I can believe in!

2

Looks like there was a mistake in releasing 0.24.2 and “latest” is actually pointing to 0.24.1

I’ll fix that shortly. Metabase-head tracks our main repo’s master branch, and really isn’t meant to be used.

If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and lend a hand https://github.com/metabase/metabase#contributing has info on setting up a development environment, etc.

3

Thanks for the insight/advice! I read through the docs yesterday, but I’m still a bit stuck on setting up an environment – I think I’ll be able to follow the steps inside a Docker container, but it’s not clear how easy it’ll be to make changes (hopefully reload on save is quick enough and I don’t have to do a full rebuild).

I used metabase-head to see if the most recent version still has the bugs I’m seeing in the 0.24.x branches, but I’d prefer to be able to have access to source that I can modify and play with in a container.

I’m looking at metabase/frontend/src/metabase/visualizations/components/LineAreaBarChart.jsx and metabase/frontend/src/metabase/lib/schema_metadata.js as possible code involved in the improper field-type guessing I’m seeing in some of the visualizations… still trying to connect the dots and get into this new stack.