My Journey at Smart Spider

For the past few months, I have been working on a couple of projects at Smart Spider. Smart Spider is a product-based startup that mainly deals with providing quality air solutions as well as interactive dashboards for businesses and technology parks. During my tenure at Smart Spider, I was working on one of their primary line of products called Vaayu Sense. Vaayu Sense is an air quality solution that is based on a combination of smart devices, where sensors, filters, purification chilled water systems, and ventilation systems, work seamlessly with the Vaayu Sense digital platform. This enables building operators and clients to be aware of, improve and manage air quality in real time.

My main focus was to work on the dashboards, that were required to be created for the clients. During the project duration, I aided in creating 2 different dashboards. The first dashboard was a building management system dashboard that was created in conjunction with another company called helix sense. This dashboard displays data from sensors placed around a business park’s utilities or amenities such as a chiller room or the AHU. Although we already had a dashboard in place for basic functionalities such as displaying data in the form of a table, it was not very intuitive or interactive. Hence, I was assigned the ticket to creating dynamic dashboards which entailed the task to replace static data tables with charts and dynamic metrics. The initial face involved planning, where I came up with the UI/UX to be switched for the current dashboard as well as the libraries that we to be used for this ticket. The sample mock-up is shown below:

After the necessary approvals, I started to work on the implementation of the UI. Now the backend of our entire system was using graphQL for making any API calls with the required payload. This process was much more different and efficient as compared to the traditional way of using REST, as we could extract the data that we required with precision and accuracy. The very first issue I encountered was that we were using the Hasura client for making calls through graphQL. However, Hasura doesn’t support various SQL-like structures such as groupby, and that is when I realised that switching to another client such as apollo or post-graphite would be much more fit for our needs. As for the dynamic dashboard, we decided to go with a fusion of both plotly and ANT charts. The result is as shown below:

This was a major learning experience for me and I had a lot to take away. For instance, while working over these dashboards I was able to get well-versed with a lot of these technologies such as GraphQL (Apollo and Hasura), and various plotting and dashboard tools such as plotly and ANT charts. Moreover, there were some extracurricular learnings as well. Since I was working with a team of people some of whom had a lot more experience than me, I had an all-around development of my communication, collaboration, and organisational skills.