Posted on
2023-02-23
by
Matt Strahan
in
Volkis News
When we started Volkis, Alexei and I had a big ranty discussion on how reports should be done. The next day I hacked together a PoC. We looked at it and went “damn, we already like this better than what’s already out there!”
Fast forward three years and Volkis is now more than just Alexei and I. That PoC ended up as Report Ranger and we’re still using it internally. Each time I ask “is Report Ranger still working for us” the answer seems to be “yes”. I follow that up with “are you sure?”, worried that they might just be trying to be nice and not hurt the feelings of the Managing Director and they still say “actually yes, I really like it!”
Part of the advantage of using our own internal tool for reporting has been the flexibility. Much of the functionality that Report Ranger has now was put in for a specific use case. We need a report that has charts, so let’s just put charts into Report Ranger. Wouldn’t it be good to have it read a spreadsheet and automatically generate our compliance report? Report Ranger can now do just that. Recently we had a report that needed two sections with separate groups of vulnerabilities and so now that change has been put together. All these breaking changes were fine - we just posted a message on our company Slack channel to give everyone a heads up and that was that.
There’s a big issue that has now cropped up though. Report Ranger is an open source project is now being used outside of Volkis. Ah well, there goes our fun. We have to start doing stuff properly!
