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Use Cases#

Classic "internal tooling" use cases#

  • Dashboards
  • Forms
  • Approval flows
  • Runbooks
  • Report running
  • Scheduled jobs
  • CRUD apps
  • Business intelligence (BI)

Specific engineering use cases#

Flank is abstractly a really simple tool that can be used in a lot of ways. These are just some ideas...

SQL Writers#

  • Reusable library of ad hoc queries. If you get into the practice of wrapping every ad-hoc query in a stored procedure, you'll get an app for free every time you write SQL!
  • Quick data exports. When you put a stored proc in Flank, the user can download the result of any run in a CSV.

Backend Engineering#

  • Offload API endpoint testing. Flank has guardrails that make it less scary / safer than Postman / Swagger, so you could have, e.g., Support Engineers test endpoints themselves.
  • Tool for configuration management. If your app has a lot of "switches" that need to be controlled by the CX team, it's easy to create lots of apps very quickly in Flank for basic CRUD.

Frontend Engineering#

  • Schedule jobs. Set up scheduled jobs without going through backend engineers
  • Deprecate the long-tail. Most admin panels have a long tail of random pages that aren't tracked. You can throw all that into Flank and focus time on the imporant parts of the site.
  • Prototype features. Instead of building UI to discover whether a tool is actually to the Ops team, just put a query in Flank and wait and see.

Data Engineering#

  • Democratize re-running. Create quick apps for teammates to re-run failed jobs, without giving them full access to Airflow
  • Offload one-off data correction. Create lots of little apps for one-off data corrections to single rows
  • Review dead letter queues. Create a quick app for QA on data that is put into a dead letter queue

Engineering Management#

  • Deprecate unused code. If you run your internal tooling through Flank, you can get metrics on which procedures/endpoints are not being used.
  • Prototype feature upstream of design/frontend. Typically you have to build a UI for a feature to discover whether it's valuable. With Flank, you can just have the backend engineer write the business logic and immediately create an app. Then track it's usage.