Let's dig in!
The team
This year we doubled in size and welcomed amazing engineers, designers, researchers, and operators. We are now all over the world, but mostly in San Francisco and Prague.
If you’re looking for a change in 2022, check out our openings — we’re hiring across engineering, marketing, and product growth. If you don’t see a role that would be the perfect fit, reach out anyway at work@deepnote.com. We’re always looking for people that are kind, curious, and excited about our mission of helping data teams do their best work.
The community
Our community grew to over 4,700 members across 12 timezones in 2021. We’ve built a ton of educational content and held five community competitions, as well as a number of webinars and events, such as our Deepnote for Education conference. We are infinitely grateful to every one of you that contributes back to the community by asking questions, showcasing your projects and wins, and sharing what you’ve learned with others.
You’re welcome to join in on the fun — don’t forget that Deepnote is free for individuals, educators, and students.
The product
In 2021, the key themes of our product development were improving our collaborative interface for data teams, doubling down on integrations so that Deepnote plays well with the rest of your stack, making SQL a first-class citizen of Deepnote, and enabling teams to easily present their work and build notebooks into interactive data apps and dashboards.
Here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve built in 2021:
Let’s take a closer look at some of these developments:
Deepnote for Teams
We launched Deepnote for Teams in June so anyone can experience the collaborative power of Teams for free. Our Starter plan now allows you to create a Team account for free with up to three collaborators. For inspiration on how our customers of all sizes — from Gusto to Discord — use the collaborative power of Deepnote, take a look at our case studies.
Teams benefit from shared data workspaces, resources, and knowledge management. You can organize your knowledge in one place to discover the work of others on your team, label your projects using categories, build templates that can be easily duplicated, get a quick overview of running projects, and more.
👉 Learn more here.
SQL in notebooks
Deepnote combines SQL, Python, and no-code charts into a single platform so you can deliver impactful insights. With SQL blocks, you can directly query your Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, MySQL, Athena, and PostgreSQL database connections. Throughout the year, we’ve been improving this feature and added the ability to query CSV files and DataFrames using SQL.
When you run SQL queries, you can assign and store resulting DataFrames in a variable to use further in your analysis. This improves the interplay between SQL and Python in notebooks and boosts your flow. Moreover, you can use advanced templating blocks inside of SQL, such as for loops and if conditional statements.
👉 See the demo.
Data apps & dashboards
We all know that notebooks are great for exploring your data, prototyping, and building the proof of concept for your analytical work. In 2021, we took that one step further — you can now take the work you've done and transform it into interactive articles, dashboards, and data apps in just a couple of clicks. All with no deployment work necessary — your point-and-click apps are easy to publish, adjust, and maintain.
👉 Learn more about publishing here.
Using this feature, you can:
- Build powerful self-serve dashboards for end users of your data projects
- Deploy interactive data apps from your browser in seconds with no setup, code, or maintenance overhead
- Publish and share your work with increased security using our granular access permissions
- Build trust in data assets through better accessibility
You can combine your published projects in your very own Deepnote profile. Your profile tells the story of your work through notebooks you've published and liked. Check out this one from Abid.
Reactive notebooks
It’s too easy to create a non-reproducible notebook with out-of-order execution. Reactivity addresses some of these issues head on — your cells are always run from top to bottom and there are no hidden states (think Excel). Reactive notebooks also help you adopt best practices, make edits to your variables during an already-running execution, iterate more quickly, and be sure that your notebook is always up to date. When you work on computationally heavy tasks, need to optimize for time, and control the flow, you can always execute your cells one by one.
👉 Learn more about reactivity in notebooks.
What's next?
We’re excited to build more things that delight you, help you collaborate with others, and make your data work more productive. That means improved Teams experience, more integrations, and some exciting announcements coming as early as February. We hope you join us on the ride!
Happy New Year from the entire Deepnote team!
