A note on the site: the automatic switch between “before” and “after” graphics is a bit jarring for me on mobile. I don’t get time to read the graphic before it switches. At first I didn’t even realize what happened and thought it was a layout glitch.
Show HN: Objectiv – Open-source product analytics infrastructure
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: Show HN: Objectiv – Open-source product analytics infrastructure
#12A note on the site: the automatic switch between “before” and “after” graphics is a bit jarring for me on mobile. I don’t get time to read the graphic before it switches. At first I didn’t even realize what happened and thought it was a layout glitch.
One of the creators here. Think you're totally right, going to disable the automatic toggle. Thanks for pointing this out.
Re: Show HN: Objectiv – Open-source product analytics infrastructure
#13This looks cool and I love the taxonomy and owning your own data.
But I wonder if you are trying to do too much. For example, why would I use Bach to transform my data instead of just doing it in my dbt project or wherever else I handle warehouse transforms?
Re: Show HN: Objectiv – Open-source product analytics infrastructure
#14This looks cool and I love the taxonomy and owning your own data. But I wonder if you are trying to do too much. For example, why would I use Bach to transform my data instead of just doing it in my dbt project or wherever else I handle warehouse transforms?
Hi, thanks for diving in. Yes, this is a lot. Let me try to explain how we got here. Bach will abstract the transformations that make up the models away from the SQL dialect, making models built using Bach reusable on any SQL based data store (once all dialects are supported of course). This allows you to generate the required SQL for your enviroment using Bach, and running that through your DBT or other transformation setup on your warehouse. This, combined with a strict taxonomy, leads to (at least we hope) reusable models between different products/users, and data platform configurations. We've not seen a way to achieve this without doing all of the above.
Re: Show HN: Objectiv – Open-source product analytics infrastructure
#15Disclaimer: I didn't try it yet!
I really like the approach and vision. However my initial reaction: Why do I want a generic taxonomy for events? Every business has their own domain. Generic click events are not really interesting, but more domain specific events are.
For example for github you would want events like "project.Starred" "project.Cloned" etc. OR for hacker news "user.addComment" comment.Upvote etc. So you would need to build your own taxonomy anyways right?
I do see the potential power of using BI tools that are built upon a generic taxonomy.
Another comment: I don't really like using "TrackedButton" components that replace Buttons. What If i want to use Next.js and want to use the Next.js's Link... It's better to have a "TrackedObject" and embed a Button inside it..
Maybe i'm too used to calling an "analytivs.trackEvent" function manually coded, because we mostly used company defined events.
If you want open source, using SnowPlow + storing it in redshift using a pipeline would also work. But I guess with Objectiv you don't need to setup anything..
Re: Show HN: Objectiv – Open-source product analytics infrastructure
#16Disclaimer: I didn't try it yet! I really like the approach and vision. However my initial reaction: Why do I want a generic taxonomy for events? Every business has their own domain. Generic click events are not really interesting, but more domain specific events are. For example for github you would want events like "project.Starred" "project.Cloned" etc. OR for hacker news "user.addComment" comment.Upvote etc. So y…
Thanks for the detailed comments. To create the first version of the taxonomy, we looked at the 50 companies we worked with doing modeling on their existing analytics data (from GA, Adobe, Mixpanel etc) and mapped their product UI’s and data team requirements into one extensible data format. In your examples, the taxonomy would classify these as interactive user actions, with a PressEvent on a Pressable UI element. This way, models can work both on the GitHub and HN examples in one generic way, so there is no need to come up with very case-specific naming and map these once you build a model. If you still have use-cases that are not covered, the taxonomy is also extensible, which enables you to use our validation & data modeling.
About replacing components: no need to do this if you don't want to, you can either: A) Swap native components without having to code anything, using the premade Tracked for a specific platform (e.g. `Click Me!`); or B) Use your own component of your liking (i.e. Next.js' Link) and wrap a TrackedContext around it that automatically triggers an Event (e.g. see https://objectiv.io/docs/tracking/react/api-reference/tracke...).
We're big fans of Snowplow for scalability and have an early integration where you can run Objectiv data straight into a SP pipeline https://github.com/objectiv/objectiv-analytics/tree/main/bac...
Re: Show HN: Objectiv – Open-source product analytics infrastructure
#17How does this compare to things like PostHog or Mixpanel?
Re: Show HN: Objectiv – Open-source product analytics infrastructure
#18How does this compare to things like PostHog or Mixpanel?
PostHog & Mixpanel are great for self-service analytics, we aim to do something different. We're building infrastructure around a generic event taxonomy, so data teams can share & collaborate on advanced modeling. We don't do the BI part, but are data warehouse native.
Re: Show HN: Objectiv – Open-source product analytics infrastructure
#19I took objectiv for a test drive a couple of days ago in our React application. It was pretty easy to get up and running. As soon as the data comes in you can use it directly with familiar tools such as a jupyter notebook. Pretty cool!