PipeLens

Inspiration About PipeLens

When I was looking for an idea for my first solo hackathon, I didn't want to build something just for the sake of participating. I wanted to solve a problem I had personally experienced.

In my day-to-day work with operations management, I deal with databases, tables, and stored procedures. When I first joined, understanding how everything connected felt like Greek to me. As I gradually learned, one question kept coming to mind: What if I could understand these dependencies before making a change, instead of figuring things out through trial and error?

That question inspired PipeLens.

PipeLens aims to make database exploration and dependency understanding easier, especially for new joiners who are eager to learn but may find complex database structures overwhelming. The idea is to help them explore tables and stored procedures, understand how they are connected, and identify potential downstream impacts before making changes.

Building PipeLens was an exciting learning experience. I used AI as a learning partner, not just to generate solutions, but also to question my choices, understand why a particular approach made sense, and explore alternatives through what-if scenarios.

Of course, the journey wasn't without challenges. Refining my initial idea through research was one of the first hurdles. Another was figuring out how to identify dependencies correctly and represent them through a Mermaid-based dependency graph. Since this was my first time working with dependency graphs, I had to experiment, validate my approach, and learn along the way.

For me, PipeLens is more than just a hackathon project. It's an attempt to turn a real problem I experienced into a practical solution that could help others navigate unfamiliar systems with greater clarity and confidence. And as my first solo hackathon project, it taught me that sometimes the most meaningful ideas come from the challenges we face ourselves.

Built With

• dependency-lineage
• fastapi
• gemini-api-key
• llm
• sql
• stored-procedure