Segment Blog

Just do something that the enterprise world cares about. Remember Segment [1], one of YC's most successful companies, started out as a small open source tool on Github [2]. But even though it was small and had basically no features, the enterprise loved it and asked for more. That's how they realized that they hit a nerve. So writing and releasing OSS may not lead to direct monetization opportunities, but it can be a great way to get in touch with enterprises and to get demand readings quickly. [1] https://segment.com/ [2] https://github.com/segmentio/analytics.js

Segment | Developers, Solutions Engineers, SDRs | San Francisco, CA / Vancouver, BC / New York City, NY | Full-time, Onsite | https://segment.com/ Segment is creating a brand new industry called Customer Data Infrastructure. Come join us to work on amazing things! We're looking for developers and solutions engineers. See what it's like to work as a developer at Segment here: https://segment.com/engineering/ And if you are interested in Solutions Engineering and are currently a developer, I'm more than happy to talk to you about my experience transitioning to becoming a Solutions Engineer as an ex-developer at Salesforce and several small startups! contact: [email protected]

Monetization - content websites turned into apps because the business is data collection. Much of the code running in these apps bypasses engineering and source control, it is injected into the page by services like https://segment.com/ and handled by Marketing, not Engineering. So you see cases where the app works great on dev machines and in prod loads 20x slower.

I'm a big fan of [Segment](https://segment.com) who do a great job of putting an abstraction layer on top of the massive selection of analytics platforms you're likely to end up using. A particularly nice touch is some of their plans having a feature where you can replay your entire event history into new analytics tools you add, allowing you to almost immediately start analysing all your data with them.

Thanks for the kind words! For ping-and-visualize, I'd recommend a tool that'll give you raw access to the underlying data. Some choices are https://amplitude.com/ and https://segment.com/. Happy to chat about pros and cons if you're curious -- [email protected].

Use http://www.segment.io for your analytics. You insert only one script into your site and the service lets you use up to 30 different analytic providers. Many of these services provide the first 30 days for free, so try as many as you like and see which ones you like best.

I helped build an analytics platform that served more than millions of events. Nothing about it is really difficult until you scale heavily. The tl;dr - It's not worth your time / energy to build from scratch at this scale. Leveraging an existing standard like the analytics.js spec [1] makes web analytics very easy and quick to get started. With this approach you just have to add one JS snippet to your website and never need to update it in your code. If you are interested in the internals, you might enjoy digging deeper into the spec to understand why it was designed this way. Two services that implement this spec are Segment [2] and MetaRouter [3] [full disclosure: I helped build the product that became MetaRouter at a previous job]. They have different target audiences and pricing models but both are worth a look. You can think of these types of services as a meta analytics service that routes your events to destination analytics services and data stores of your choice. The great thing about using the standard is you can benefit from all of the many integrations that have already been created with various analytics services, databases, data warehouses, etc [4]. These destination catalogs can also help you decide what services to explore and try next as you need more advanced features. To get started with a meta analytics service, in the management dashboard, just add your API keys and config values for each service. For a simple service like Google Analytics…

I appreciate and welcome this requirement from Apple. Some time ago I built something I call “Network Blackhole”. The project intercepts HTTP traffic from applications that I installed in either my MacBook or iPhone. An excellent example of this is Crashlytics [1], Segment [2], and Sentry [3], which are among a list of popular web services that many developers use to report bugs and crashes in their software, and the famous Google Analytics, which I hope I don’t need to explain what it is used for. With the help of Little Snitch [4] a popular network monitor for macOS, I detect when an app tries to connect to one of these services, or similar. Then I execute a tool written in Go like so: “blackhole example.com” which does the following: 1. Inserts domain into /etc/hosts 2. Create an HTTP web server (in Go) 3. Adds a match-all endpoint to the server 4. Creates an SSL certificate with mkcert [5] 5. Creates an Nginx virtual-host for the server 6. ??? 7. Profit In the end, and after 1-2 minutes, I have all the traffic to that domain gracefully redirected to a black hole, reducing the amount of data that I leak to 3rd-party websites. However, don’t get me wrong, I understand the purpose of these services, I haven’t said they are evil or anything like that. I would probably use them myself if I had to, but I certainly would add an alert to ask for explicit consent from the user to send this information to a service that I won’t even have control over. If one of them…

Sure but how about Pixel. Or Google Analytics, Clicky, Alexa (analytics not the talking thing), Adroll , ... I mean the amount of trackers I can toss on a website is mind boggling and super easy, all hoovering as much data as possible. This is not exclusive to Facebook nor do I think they gather the most data. After sorting through this guys first half dozen tweets I finally realized he's talking about AI and advertising. As an ecommerceguy here's my take. I'd love to be able to upload a product feed, have FB or whomever evaluate those products and push them to whomever the adbot/algorithm/ai/hall9k whatever we're calling it today; as long as it returns good ROI, happy customers and less work for me I'm happy. This is already somewhat possible with Google Shopping Feed. So again, besides this helped Trump, why the outrage? All I see is people freaking out at what has been public knowledge for years albeit obfuscated under a massive sheen of PRSpeak. FWIW I have always actively stayed away from Facebook as much as possible to the point I tell my sister to take photos off her feed of me. But here I am tangentially defending them. I wanted to add a link to this site, It connects to over 200 trackers. https://segment.com/

Segment.io - San Francisco, CA Mobile Engineer We're looking for an extremely good mobile engineer to help us change the way people approach mobile analytics. This is a perfect position for someone who loves building clean APIs for others to use. You enjoy not only building mobile apps, but writing the libraries that power those apps. You're fluent in everything to do with iOS as a platform, and if you have Android chops that's a huge bonus, but definitely not a requirement. You'd be working on current and new features of the mobile SDKs themselves, as well as helping to write code for where they touch our Node.js backend, where we process tens of millions of events per day. And you'd be in charge of our entire mobile offering, which is used in product by lots of big companies like Live Nation, Nest Labs and The Knot. You'd be joining a team of very talented engineers that are in love with open-source. Both of those SDKs are open-source, as is tons of our codebase[1]. So if you enjoy working with smart people and getting to make a name for yourself releasing the things you work on to other developers, you've found the right place. Not only that, but you'd be working on a few of our still-secret mobile projects that we're pretty confident are going to change the way people integrate third party code into every mobile app they write afterwards. [0]: https://segment.io [1]: https://github.com/segmentio --- To apply, email us at [email protected] with: 1. a…

What we've found is that different analytics services help us answer different kinds of questions. For example, here are the tools we use to find each metric he mentions: Distribution 1. New users by channel: Google Analytics Source breakdown satisfies what I need to know here. If you want to look at conversion to a Goal broken down by source, there's the "Goals" view in GA. 2. Total users: easiest for us here is to just query our database. 3. Cost of customer acquisition, lifetime value, pay back period: again Google Analytics if you're doing adwords advertising. Engagement 1. Active users: here a tool like KISSmetrics, Keen IO or Mixpanel will let you see how many people are really succeeding in using your service. 2. % of users using top 3 key features in a given month: same tools as active Revenue 1. Revenue growth: Stripe or w/e your payments solution is. 2. Conversion to paid: KISSmetrics and Mixpanel are the best tools to help you measure conversion rates. 3. Avg spend per paying customer: Stripe or w/e your payments solution is. 4. Churn rate: Mixpanel probably does this best, but querying your database might be a better option depending on how you measure churn. 5. Burn rate: your bank account! What we've found is that no single tool answers all these questions well. Most companies we talk to use a mix of Google Analytics for basic stats and distribution measurement. KISSmetrics, Mixpanel or Keen IO for engagement metrics and tracking. Customer.io,…

I'm not quite sure how to place this. For general app telemetry there's https://opentelemetry.io and for tracking user behavior similar to how it's explained in your docs it looks like https://segment.io would be the closest competitor. How is telemetry.sh different from the above-mentioned?

OP here - we avoid sequences in all but one part of our application due to a dependency. We use [KSUIDs][1] and UUID v4 in various places. This one "gotcha" applies to any sequence, so it's worth calling out as general advice when running a migration like this. [1]: https://segment.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-the-uuid/

This seems to be Segment: https://segment.com/ I don't know what they do. I couldn't find the open source library in question either.

In the end, engineering is just whether the thing works with minimal maintenance. And ultimately, I've had great experiences using DBaaQ for low volume data movement. It works as a persistent queue with easy to do retries etc. For high throughput (we had ad tech servers with 1E7 hits/s) we used a home-built low-latency queue that supported real time and persisted data. But for low throughput stuff, the DBaaQ worked fine. And ultimately, maybe it was a lack of imagination on our part since Segment was successful with a mid-throughput DBaaQ https://segment.com/blog/introducing-centrifuge/

At my last job we ran into the same issue you're going through and also wanted to limit the amount of client-side tracking scripts running on page-load. We ended up using Segment (https://segment.com/) to act as an Event hub and they have integrations with Facebook, Google Analytics, and other platforms to forward events to. It worked well once you get through the pain of setup and any incorrect configurations. If I remember correctly, it wasn't a complete replacement for things like Google Tag Manager if you're using that but it certainly replaced many event tracking calls for a single event tracking call.

> Which of those things are not true of these new UUID formats proposed? Well, the entire UUID is 128, so obviously not 128 bits of pseudorandom data. > What about 128 bits of pseudorandom data is preferable to you? Same as with any hash: collision resistance. That's why we don't use SHA-1 for anything secure any more. The dash problem arises not in the URL but the multipart/form-data encoding, as well as the following: "when UUIDs are indexed by a search engine, where the dashes will likely be interpreted as token delimiters. The base62 encoding avoids this pitfall and retains the lexicographic ordering properties of the binary encoding." https://segment.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-the-uuid/

This [1] is a good read about design decisions and potential problems you face with a service like this at scale. [1] https://segment.com/blog/introducing-centrifuge/

Segment's blog posts on cost optimisation have plenty of detail and tips on this topic: https://segment.com/blog/the-million-dollar-eng-problem/ https://segment.com/blog/spotting-a-million-dollars-in-your-aws-accoun… https://segment.com/blog/the-10m-engineering-problem/ Similarly this Honeycomb writeup is also excellent: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/treading-in-haunted-graveyards/ By the sounds of it, you need to take drastic action. It sounds like you will not be able to just optimise your AWS spend to get more runway, though you should definitely do some bill optimisation. You will need to optimise your product itself and maybe even getting rid of unprofitable customers. If you are not sure exactly who or what is driving the AWS cost, take a look at Honeycomb to get the ability to dive deep into what is eating up resources.

I wanted to try it, but their RSS/ATOM feed support is broken. The feed[1] currently 404's with a single emoji[2]. No feed support is a non-starter for me. Question for you since you presumably read their blog: Do you follow a bunch of blogs/news sources? If so, how do you do it without using feeds? [1]: https://segment.com/blog/atom.xml [2]: https://emojipedia.org/police-car-light/

In short, I don't, but it's an interesting idea! Have you seen https://segment.com? It's a similar concept, for analytics services only. You set up segment in your app once, and they act as a middleman, such that you can turn other services on top on and off at will. Seems to have been a huge success. You'd need to find a set of integrations that all fundamentally revolve around a similar data model though (chat, or task trackers, or whatever), you're not going to be able to sync anything to anything.

I think it would make great sense! Currently, we automatically connect to Segment (https://segment.com/integrations/modern-pricing/) to make the integration easier. Additional integrations have been commonly requested thus far, but we are prioritizing open platforms to start.

Segment has done an awesome job of building a great product but it is impossible to be provably secure and private given that they host all the data. Rudder can avoid situations such as the Segment Security incident that happened recently. https://segment.com/security/bulletins/incident090519/ Very excited about this project!

My favorite story about DynamoDB and provisioning is https://segment.com/blog/the-million-dollar-eng-problem/

Hi there, I head up the channel program at Segment and I'd love an opportunity to answer these questions and give you a demo of our products––I suspect we could work well together. Can I ask you to (1) sign up to become a channel partner: https://segment.com/partners/channel/ and (2) send me an email to get started? [email protected]

With uBlock Origin it works, a gray overlay on the page disappears after a while, but it still contacts: - Cloudflare - Google (several domains, fonts, Google proper, JS) - https://segment.com (I read the landing page and don't understand what they do) - wordpress.com 12 other domains are blocked

And those are just the ones that make it explicit. It's also pretty easy to mask usage of GA via a reverse proxy[1], or indirectly use GA via services such as Segment[2]. While both do create a degree of separation between your device and Google's servers, it still underscores your point of getting away from Google entirely being far more difficult than just avoiding Search. [1] https://medium.freecodecamp.org/save-your-analytics-from-content-block… [2] https://segment.com/

Segment | Engineering | SF, Vancouver | Full-time | https://segment.com Segment is growing quickly and hiring great engineers to help us scale our engineering org. If you would like to see all of our job postings, https://segment.com/jobs. Some work that our engineers are doing: - https://segment.com/blog/the-million-dollar-eng-problem/ - https://segment.com/blog/5-advanced-testing-techniques-in-go/ - https://segment.com/blog/secure-access-to-100-aws-accounts/

https://segment.com/ seems to take design really seriously. They also have a pretty nice React toolkit here: https://segmentio.github.io/evergreen/?selectedKind=alert&selected…

Great to see more examples of image diffing. Segment recently wrote a post about their process, too: https://segment.com/blog/perceptual-diffing-with-niffy/