9 posts tagged “analytics”
2024
Them: Can you just quickly pull this data for me?
Me: Sure, let me just:
SELECT * FROM some_ideal_clean_and_pristine.table_that_you_think_exists
2023
Analytics: Hacker News v.s. a tweet from Elon Musk
My post Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” really took off.
[... 817 words]2021
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About GitHub (But Were Afraid To Ask) (via) ClickHouse by Yandex is an open source column-oriented data warehouse, designed to run analytical queries against TBs of data. They've loaded the full GitHub Archive of events since 2011 into a public instance, which is a great way of both exploring GitHub activity and trying out ClickHouse. Here's a query I just ran that shows number of watch events per year, for example:
SELECT toYear(created_at) as yyyy, count()
FROM github_events
WHERE event_type = 'WatchEvent' group by yyyy
2020
If you are pre-product market fit it's probably too early to think about event based analytics. If you have a small number of users and are able to talk with all of them, you will get much more meaningful data getting to know them than if you were to set up product analytics. You probably don't have enough users to get meaningful data from product analytics anyways.
Defining Data Intuition. Ryan T. Harter, Principal Data Scientist at Mozilla defines data intuition as “a resilience to misleading data and analyses”. He also introduces the term “data-stink” as a similar term to “code smell”, where your intuition should lead you to distrust analysis that exhibits certain characteristics without first digging in further. I strongly believe that data reports should include a link the raw methodology and numbers to ensure they can be more easily vetted—so that data-stink can be investigated with the least amount of resistance.
2019
Client-side instrumentation for under $1 per month. No servers necessary. (via) Rolling your own analytics used to be too complex and expensive to be worth the effort. Thanks to cloud technologies like Cloudfront, Athena, S3 and Lambda you can now inexpensively implement client-side analytics (via requests to a tracking pixel) that stores detailed logs on S3, then use Amazon Athena to run queries against those logs ($5/TB scanned) to get detailed reporting. This post also introduced me to Snowplow, an open source JavaScript analytics script (released by a commercial analytics platform) which looks very neat—it’s based on piwik.js, the tracker from the open-source Piwik analytics tool.
2018
Mozilla Telemetry: In-depth Data Pipeline (via) Detailed behind-the-scenes look at an extremely sophisticated big data telemetry processing system built using open source tools. Some of this is unsurprising (S3 for storage, Spark and Kafka for streams) but the details are fascinating. They use a custom nginx module for the ingestion endpoint and have a “tee” server written in Lua and OpenResty which lets them route some traffic to alternative backend.
2009
Google Analytics goes async. This is excellent news—the latest version of the Google Analytics JavaScript is designed to allow for asynchronous loading, so it won’t hold up the rendering of your page. Analytics and banner ads are the two worst offenders when it comes to slowing down page loads. Now if only a banner ad vendor would follow suit...
2003
Interactive Python
I adore the Python interactive interpreter. I use it for development (it’s amazing how many bugs you can skip by testing your code line by line in the interactive environment), I use it for calculations, but recently I’ve also found myself using it just as a general tool for answering questions.
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