// the take
just-dashboard lets you define dashboards in YAML or JSON and renders them as D3-powered charts in the browser. It's aimed at anyone who wants a shareable visualization without writing frontend code — point it at a GitHub Gist and get a URL. The sweet spot is quick, static data exploration, not production BI tooling.
The YAML DSL is genuinely readable — the food comparison example in the README is 20 lines and produces a real layout with multiple charts. The Gist-as-backend idea is clever: zero infrastructure for simple public datasets. Test coverage looks solid for a project this size, with co-located test files for each component. Renovate is configured, so dependencies at least get automated PR nudges.
Last meaningful activity looks stale — 1581 stars but only 58 forks suggests people starred it and moved on rather than adopting it. The `bottoml.in` hosted version in the README is a third-party domain you don't control, which is a dead link waiting to happen. Data fetching is locked to public URLs and GitHub Gists; there's no auth story, so any private or internal data requires you to self-host and figure out CORS yourself. The YAML parser is custom and the DSL is underdocumented enough that you'll be reading source to debug layout issues.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in July 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →