Building Admin Panels That Developers Don’t Hate Maintaining

The Usual Admin Panel Problem

Most admin panels start as “just a simple CRUD UI” and end as a mess of one-off components and copy–pasted tables.

My Approach

1. Treat Admin as a First-Class Product

• Clear navigation
• Consistent patterns for tables, filters, and details
• Keyboard shortcuts where it makes sense

2. A Real Table Abstraction

• One Table component configured with:
• Columns
• Filters
• Sorters
• Row actions

Backed by:

• Server-side pagination
• A single query abstraction on the backend

3. Role-Aware UI

• Hide what a role can’t access
• Disable instead of hiding when it helps understanding
• Show why an action is disabled

Good admin panels make ops teams happy — and happy ops teams keep your product running.