Studio 3T Told Me I Couldn't Build a Better Tool — The Jobless Grad That Built VisuaLeaf
Last May, at a .locals event in London, I had an interesting encounter with someone from Studio 3T.
I had flown all the way from California to London for a trip and decided to attend the event while I was there. After I introduced myself and told them I was building VisuaLeaf, and... one person told me I wouldn't be able to build a better tool than theirs. So I took it personally. I was a fresh grad with no job, and VisuaLeaf was all I was working on, so I decided to prove them wrong.
Ever since I posted VisuaLeaf here in 2024 and it became the 2nd highest all-time post, I've watched this subreddit get flooded with people trying to build their own MongoDB tools, especially with AI.
Every week there's another MongoDB GUI that someone built in a weekend, calls it production-ready, and posts it here. It's hard to get excited about another tool that does the same basic things as everything else, especially when most of them still miss what actually matters: a smooth experience. A lot of them crash or lag when the data isn't even that big. I don't think a couple of prompts can replace thousands of hours of attention to detail, testing, and optimization. That's the experience I set out to build.
This is now my 2 year journey of building the best MongoDB GUI out there.
Honestly, too much has changed since the last time I posted here, and I think, for now, VisuaLeaf has all the features I really wanted in the app. It’s also stable enough that I’m now seeing people from actual companies using it daily, which caught me by surprise haha. I’m really happy that more people are discovering VisuaLeaf every day and that hundreds of people are actively using it every month.
Over the past two years, I spent an entire year optimizing a table (yes...), built a complex query builder, created a visual schema designer that can materialize MongoDB collections, added mongosync, and even built our own multithreaded dump utility, which we benchmarked against the shell's mongodump and found to be faster when exporting whole databases or multiple collections.
It may not sound like much but, the table is probably the thing I'm most proud of, even though it's literally just a TABLE.
I spent a LITERAL year optimizing it because I wanted it to feel as smooth as possible while working with large datasets. I basically built my own AG Grid from scratch because the libraries I tried didn't have the features I wanted like expanding objects or arrays as new columns.
It was one of the hardest optimization journeys I made but I’m really happy how it turned out because it’s literally one of the smoothest tables out there that is BUILT to visualize data for databases. The tree view was a lot easier since it was just 1 dimensional but still had its own tricks to expand thousands of nodes at the same time instantly (I also used the virtual scrolling engine I made for the table view to the tree view and made the tree view scroll smoother than official Angular virtual scrolling libraries). And during all that time, I focused on making the data retrieval to be as efficient as possible so much so that it was the fastest GUI out there for loading data.
After all that, I genuinely don’t think there’s objectively a better MongoDB GUI out there, but maybe that’s just me haha.
I’m coming for you, 3T ;) (I’ll remember you telling me that I wouldn’t be able to make a better tool hehe- for the full story you can dm me lol)
If you want to check out all the changes, feel free to check it out here: visualeaf.com
And if you want to help me on my journey with VisuaLeaf feel free to join the discord : we could talk about bugs, features that you guys want, etc: https://discord.com/invite/TR6J56Y3rF