Powering Energy Storage
Beyond Excel
Calvin Hendryx-Parker, CTO
Six Feet Up
Energy
Storage Projects
Stages
- Project/System Requirements
- Sizing
- Configuration
- Build
- Maintain
Why
Excel in First Place
- Widely known
- Easy to bootstrap
- Easy to adjust to business case
- Easy collaboration and sharing
- Handling of massive tabular data
- Handle complex formulas and business logic
- High precision calculations
Tables…
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Why
NOT Use Excel
- No scaling
- No reliable versioning
- No protection of business know-how and internals
- No fault tolerance
- No field permissions
- No tests
Why
Django?
- Batteries Included
- Mature
- Secure
- Reliable
- Extendable
- Scalable
- Testable
Our
Stack
- Django backend
- PostgreSQL database
djangorestframework — DRF, Django REST-Frameworkdrf_spectacular — OpenAPIdjango-rest-framework-simplejwt — JWTdjango-filter — Filter classes for DRF- NextJS UI
Transition
- Evaluate
- Prototype
- Review
- Build
- Switch
Transition
Evaluate
- Collect ALL formulas
- Document them
- Add examples
- Add spreadsheet version information
Transition
Prototype
- Using Jupyter Notebooks
- Rapid development
- No full stack required
- Let customer test with real data
- Early feedback
Front-end
- NextJS with Ant Design
- Batteries-included front-end
- Authentication, protected routes, API access
- Implementation against OpenAPI specification
- CSV & PDF exports
- Reports
Challenges
General
- New spreadsheet versions
- Changes in the formulas
- Parallel usage of Excel and Django
- Requirement changes
Challenges
UI & UX
- Massive amount of tabular data
- Very long forms
- Don’t create a web version of Excel
Conclusion
- Use Django from beginning if you can
- Use Excel if you have to
- Transition to Django early
