Barbara Nelson

Rick Spencer

Head of Platform, InfluxData

Rick Spencer is the Head of Platform at InfluxData, where his responsibilities include leadership of core storage engine, developer tooling, and running InfluxDB Cloud 2.0 on Kubernetes in multiple clouds and regions.
Rick’s background includes pioneering work on Developer Usability for the first version of Visual Studio.net, and leadership of the Ubuntu project, one of the largest and most active Open Source communities.

Currently, Rick resides outside of Washington, DC where, in addition to leading the InfluxData Platform Team, he continues to pursue his interest in developer usability as well as playing with embedded microcontrollers, music, gardening, and video games.

Talk Title: Visualizing InfluxDB 2.0 Dashboards

InfluxDB provides the ability to build dashboards — web-based UI for visualizing your data. InfluxDB 2.0 APIs allows getting the dashboards — the cells, its queries and views. This can be used to define views in InfluxDB and render them in other places. In this session, Wojciech Kocjan and Rick Spencer will explore using the dashboards as a generic way to show data from InfluxDB, using different, not officially supported mechanisms. They will begin by introducing InfluxDB dashboards and how they’re defined at the API level.

They will then walk through how to render your dashboards as images using Python and matplotlib library and discuss some problems related to rendering dashboards as images. They will also mention how this code can be used to render black-and-white or grayscale images, that can then be shown on an E Ink display, along with the hardware used for this project.

Next, they will talk about Flux Mobile — an open source Flutter + Dart project that provides components to build Android and iOS apps that read or write data to InfluxDB 2.0. Finally, they will show how to use it to build an app that renders your dashboard in a mobile-friendly way in less than 10 minutes.