One table, 66 screens

Analysts spend their day in tables, so in a security console the table is the product. As an intern I added column ordering and show and hide to the shared table. Over the next three years I became its main author.

Columns size themselves from their content, so no developer guesses a width. Analysts reorder, pin, hide and search columns, expand any row for detail, filter and page on the server, export to CSV, and save the whole arrangement as a view that loads next time.

Memoization stopped the whole table re-rendering when a single row is selected.

66 screens use it. I wrote 64% of its code, and four other engineers have adopted it in their own features. The table on this site’s home page borrows its manners.