I tend to think of software in terms of composable units, so Unix-like utilities are very attractive in my workflow, and Datasette just fits right into that model. Datasette is easy to deploy and does one thing well. I can use it on my little single-board computer I use for hobby projects and allow other machines on my network to have an API to view a database a daemon is populating there. But it works just as well to share larger, static data sets on the internet. It's just a tool that fits right into its niche in the stack and does its job really well (much like sqlite).
As engineers, we also tend to think in terms of modularity and control - call this "tool flexibility."
With Dropbase, we're balancing flexibility with the goal of creating an experience that allows users who can't directly work with these composable units.
How we balance experience vs flexibility is that we give users full control of the database and the processing steps (we even allow you to export Python code you can run anywhere else).
We found this is the right balance for the uses cases we're targeting, although, we're still doing a lot of research to figure out the right balance and that balance might also evolve over time.
