Truechart Plus

Power BI and Qlik both expose an extension API, and both hand you the same hard constraint: your visual runs inside their update loop, on their data model, within their memory budget. A chart that renders comfortably in a standalone React app will stutter — or freeze the entire report — once it has to redraw on every cross-filter, every resize and every selection change.

The clients asking for these visuals are not asking for decoration. They want encodings the stock library cannot express: layered comparisons, custom hierarchies, domain-specific scales, over datasets in the tens of thousands of rows.

Every visual is split into three layers. A data layer reshapes the host's data view into a flat, typed structure. A layout layer built on D3 computes scales, stacks and paths, and never touches the DOM. A thin React layer paints exactly what the layout layer produced.

Keeping D3 out of the DOM is the decision that makes the rest work. There is no double bookkeeping between two libraries that both want to own nodes, no orphaned SVG after an update, and the layout layer is testable without a browser.

• Memoized layout computation keyed on the host's data revision, so a resize never recomputes scales
• Canvas-backed rendering paths for series past the point where SVG stops being viable
• A shared token layer so every extension inherits the report theme instead of hardcoding colour
• Property-pane schemas typed end to end, so a formatting option cannot exist in the UI without a handler

I lead a team of five-plus developers here: setting the architecture, reviewing every pull request, and clearing whatever is blocking someone before it eats a sprint. Review is where most of the performance work actually happens — the difference between a visual that redraws in 16ms and one that takes 400ms is usually four lines inside a render path.

Alongside that I refactored a legacy React codebase in the same product, cutting unnecessary re-renders by roughly 25% and making the interface measurably quicker to respond.