This is very cool. I think there's a lot of room to grow this space: local "folders" that do some "magic" in the cloud.
Obviously, sync (Dropbox) is just the beginning, and Dropbase takes it a step further. There's been times where I had a (big-ish) CSV and wanted to run a few tests/queries on it. Auto-importing it into some database and being able to run SQL/Python on the dataset (without bootstrapping that locally) would've been a godsend.
Thank you! Please give it a try and let us know if you have any feedback.
One of the features we added is to do make the "magic" replicable (or deployable in production). So we keep track of processing steps and let you export Python code that that applies those same processing steps. This could be used to run the exact same steps in a larger version of that dataset later.
If you're open to PHP, I found the perfect tool for myself. The Laravel framework has an ORM called Eloquent. Usually it maps models to database tables (hence ORM) but you can also bring it to get its rows from a CSV which it then maps into an in-memory sqlite database.
You can then work with it through the ORMs methods, with regular SQL or with external tools like Tinkerwell that just displays them in a tabular fashion.
This reminds me of @BrandonM's famous reply to Drew Houston[1] :) Of course there are ways of doing it. But sticking something in a folder and stuff just automagically "working" is a much more pleasant workflow -- and more importantly, how you create value. Jimmy, I'd say you're in good company!
Please don't forget about BrandonM's follow up comment though!
I've seen the thread linked as a 'tech people don't appreciate simplicity' but he actually acknowledges Dropbox could be very useful and wishes success.
The other criticisms were also very valid at the time, and were acted upon.
Obviously, sync (Dropbox) is just the beginning, and Dropbase takes it a step further. There's been times where I had a (big-ish) CSV and wanted to run a few tests/queries on it. Auto-importing it into some database and being able to run SQL/Python on the dataset (without bootstrapping that locally) would've been a godsend.
Good luck with this!