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I was the overall TL of FB's Metric Platform for some time. I would be interesting in learning how it works. The site only kind of tells me what its not, not w

by voz_ 5y ago

I was the overall TL of FB's Metric Platform for some time. I would be interesting in learning how it works. The site only kind of tells me what its not, not what it is? How does it work?

d--b 5y ago
This tool falls in the “very tactical” category, and is mostly aimed at startups who want more than Excel and not invest in lock-in platforms. It basically is an electron app running the observable runtime. It’s got some differences in the layout, but that’s mostly what it is. But yeah a video will do well. Thanks for the feedback.
- voz_ 5y ago
  What feedback? I was asking, and you gave me some weird non answer. I still have no idea what this is. Perhaps you replied to the wrong comment?
  - d--b 5y ago
    The feedback that you didn’t understand what it was… sorry apparently I failed again… This tool is a live programming environment. The code that you write is organized in cells, and the observable runtime links cells together in a computing graph (similar to how cells in excel form a computation graph). Conceptually it is very similar to data science notebooks (and that is in fact what observable is) The language is JavaScript. Some will say that JavaScript is not suited to do data manipulation, and in many regards it is true. But in many use cases, javascript in the browser is good enough, and it has the added benefit to allow you to use all kinds of data visualization libraries and it doesn’t require you to hire Python guys, which in my experience can bring its own set of problems. What I meant by it being very tactical is that you are limited to calculations that fit in a browser window. So it doesn’t really scale to the size of FB… that said it would allow someone at Facebook to fiddle with the results of some large scale data analysis. Hopefully that explains a little more. But yeah really a demo will be a lot clearer

by voz_ 5y ago

I was the overall TL of FB's Metric Platform for some time. I would be interesting in learning how it works. The site only kind of tells me what its not, not what it is? How does it work?

d--b 5y ago

This tool falls in the “very tactical” category, and is mostly aimed at startups who want more than Excel and not invest in lock-in platforms. It basically is an electron app running the observable runtime. It’s got some differences in the layout, but that’s mostly what it is. But yeah a video will do well. Thanks for the feedback.

voz_ 5y ago
What feedback? I was asking, and you gave me some weird non answer. I still have no idea what this is. Perhaps you replied to the wrong comment?
- d--b 5y ago
  The feedback that you didn’t understand what it was… sorry apparently I failed again… This tool is a live programming environment. The code that you write is organized in cells, and the observable runtime links cells together in a computing graph (similar to how cells in excel form a computation graph). Conceptually it is very similar to data science notebooks (and that is in fact what observable is) The language is JavaScript. Some will say that JavaScript is not suited to do data manipulation, and in many regards it is true. But in many use cases, javascript in the browser is good enough, and it has the added benefit to allow you to use all kinds of data visualization libraries and it doesn’t require you to hire Python guys, which in my experience can bring its own set of problems. What I meant by it being very tactical is that you are limited to calculations that fit in a browser window. So it doesn’t really scale to the size of FB… that said it would allow someone at Facebook to fiddle with the results of some large scale data analysis. Hopefully that explains a little more. But yeah really a demo will be a lot clearer