Streamlit is Awesome — Here’s Why

Let’s talk a little about Streamlit. On October 1st, Streamlit founder Adrian Treuille debuted his new app framework, Streamlit. At the exact same time, I and the rest of my cohort were gearing up to begin our final projects. We had a one month deadline, and we had to not only design our own project, but we had to get our own data, and do our own analyses, all without guidance from our instructors. Lastly, we had to make it “Presentation Ready.” That is, it had to have a front end for display for Flatiron’s “Science Fair,” where we debuted our projects and would spend 3 hours talking and presenting our project to whoever wanted to stop by and look.

This was going to be daunting. Potential employers were going to be there! Other data science students and instructors were going to be there! We couldn’t simply fall back on Powerpoint and Tableau, we had to to impress with our ability to not only analyze and process, but also to present in a digestible format that anyone could understand! The truth of the matter, our instructors stressed, that we were very rarely going to be presenting to other data scientists, we had to present to stakeholders who may or may not understand our process!

Traditionally, data scientists looking to build an easy to read frontend for others to test their models and data used a combination of python, mixed with Flask and Dash to get it online and functioning. Dash is an app framework that allows you to use python, but also requires a blend of HTML in order to customize the layout of your app. This is…