Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by remram | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

remram

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.

View on HN

https://segment.com/opensource/

I believe the library in question is "analytics.js"

I tried to understand the segment analytics open source sdk coming from the apache unomi project's documentation. It seems unomi is using analytics.js syntax in tracking users.

I still don't get the benefit, though.

I know quite a few analytics tools and have implemented my fair share of these. But still. I just run into a wall every time I try to understand the OS analytics.js benefits.

Thanks!

Direct link: https://github.com/segmentio/analytics.js Now deprecated and replaced by https://github.com/segmentio/analytics-next

You may find it at https://github.com/orgs/segmentio/repositories?type=all

Which is the one mentioned in the article, which is touted to be the single thing responsible for their success?

> This open-source library had only 580 lines of code

I'm sure it's in there, but even filtering out forks there's 289 results.

Probably this.

https://github.com/segmentio/analytics.js/tags?after=0.8.10

> Segment collects events from your web & mobile apps and provides a complete data toolkit to every team in your company

But what does that mean? Do they receive event data or timeseries and graph it?

they forward those events to all of your other systems (e.g. CRM, webhook, helpdesk). they can also do some data health/quality monitoring.

It seems that this open source library can directly submit web tracking data to multiple platforms, like Google Analytics. If this is the case I don't understand what Segment the company does.

I understand that I am probably not their target population, but I really can't decipher the buzzwords on their website.

No. There is no data visualizer inside of Segment. It’s a very expensive customer-data-infrastructure tool.

Integrate segment with your application on the web and mobile and you can enable or disable downstream data delivery to any one of the services at https://segment.com/catalog/ without touching your code. This leaves your engineering team free of requests to integrate your product with new services your marketing and analytics teams want to use.

Kind of a blend of Zapier, an ETL platform, and an analytics platform.

Makes it really easy for analyst roles to start collecting and providing data insights. Not as robust as a dedicated team, but easy and accessible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com