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> Over the summer of 2016, we came up against a new twist on the project. We had a model that ran overnight to generate data for anticipated ridership in China.

by acchow 3y ago

> Over the summer of 2016, we came up against a new twist on the project. We had a model that ran overnight to generate data for anticipated ridership in China. That data wasn’t useful on its own, but if you fed it into a tab on a special Excel spreadsheet, you’d get a little interactive Excel tool for choosing driver incentives. Our job was to take that spreadsheet and make it available as the interface for this model’s data. They eventually built a homegrown "Excel" clone as the UI for their model because "city teams only know how to use Excel". I would have done it the other way around - connected Excel to the data output by the model so the "city teams" could continue to use real excel. I think most finance teams do something like this.

ftxbro 3y ago
> I would have done it the other way around - connected Excel to the data output by the model so the "city teams" could continue to use real excel. Yeah except: “When you click in the cells of the spreadsheet you can see the formulas. You shouldn’t be able to do that.” “You said to make it just like Excel.” “People working for Didi apply for intern jobs at Uber China and then exfiltrate our data. We can’t let them see the formulas or they’ll just copy what we do!”
bastawhiz 3y ago
Because the city teams were in China, we didn't have this luxury. Everything had to be behind Uber's beyondcorp equivalent, and there was no real way to auth folks from the Chinese mainland. Our only surface was the browser.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  A dedicated satellite link cross pacific is not that much money. Then again maybe the CFO didn't know so he took the easiest known option.
  - bastawhiz 3y ago
    I've always been fond of container ships loaded up with entangled qbits. Much lower latency!
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      If you don't quite believe it, it's almost certainly less per annum then 2 months of a typical mid-level SRE's loaded cost, even in 2016. Bandwidth would have been not great, way under a gigabit, but it wouldn't matter in this case.
hansonw 3y ago
I’m building a solution that works like this - we directly connect spreadsheet models to company databases (even converting pivots/formulas to SQL). Would love to chat with anyone that might find this valuable: https://arcwise.app https://arcwise.app

by acchow 3y ago

ftxbro 3y ago

> I would have done it the other way around - connected Excel to the data output by the model so the "city teams" could continue to use real excel. Yeah except: “When you click in the cells of the spreadsheet you can see the formulas. You shouldn’t be able to do that.” “You said to make it just like Excel.” “People working for Didi apply for intern jobs at Uber China and then exfiltrate our data. We can’t let them see the formulas or they’ll just copy what we do!”

bastawhiz 3y ago

Because the city teams were in China, we didn't have this luxury. Everything had to be behind Uber's beyondcorp equivalent, and there was no real way to auth folks from the Chinese mainland. Our only surface was the browser.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
A dedicated satellite link cross pacific is not that much money. Then again maybe the CFO didn't know so he took the easiest known option.
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  I've always been fond of container ships loaded up with entangled qbits. Much lower latency!
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    If you don't quite believe it, it's almost certainly less per annum then 2 months of a typical mid-level SRE's loaded cost, even in 2016. Bandwidth would have been not great, way under a gigabit, but it wouldn't matter in this case.

hansonw 3y ago

I’m building a solution that works like this - we directly connect spreadsheet models to company databases (even converting pivots/formulas to SQL). Would love to chat with anyone that might find this valuable: https://arcwise.app https://arcwise.app