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salsakran

557 karma · joined July 20, 2009

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salsakran··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2021)
Metabase | https://metabase.com | REMOTE | Full-time | Engineering Product and Design

We're hiring for multiple positions across the company.

Metabase is open source analytics software that makes it easy to ask questions of your data. It interfaces with a number of databases / data warehouses (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Postgres, MySQL, etc) and has a simple and powerful UI and UX that sits on top of it.

Tech stack: Clojure, Javascript, React, Redux, AWS (ECS, Autoscaling, Aurora, RDS, SecretsManager, S3)

Roles: Frontend Engineering, Backend Engineering, Success Engineering, DevOps, Product Marketing Manager, Product Designer, Product Manager

See https://www.metabase.com/jobs/

salsakran··on Best Practices for BI Dashboards
The best pilots most certainly use instruments when in clouds, storms or nighttime.

The trick with startups is that half the time you don't know you're in the clouds until too late. Especially in companies with immature reckoning of what customers are costing you, how growth is actually going and what users are doing, it's easy to hit a mountainside before you even realize you're off course.

It's worth pointing out that most KPI dashboards tend to be simply bad, and people tend mismatch their metrics to their cadence (eg looking at total numbers in a nightly email or quarterly numbers in a weekly kpi dashboard). Stop me before I rant for 20 pages on whether KPIs in the wild actually have anything to do with predictive performance of a function vs a backward looking number of convenience.

salsakran··on Launch HN: Haystack (YC W21) – Engineering analytics that don’t suck
What pricing? Can't find it anywhere on the site.
salsakran··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2021)
Metabase | https://metabase.com | REMOTE | Full-time | Backend, Frontend, Full Stack, and DevOps engineers

We're hiring for multiple positions across the Engineering team (and in many other non-engineering roles).

Metabase is open source analytics software that makes it easy for anyone in your company to ask questions of your data. It interfaces with a number of databases / data warehouses (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Postgres, MySQL, etc) and has a simple and powerful UI and UX that sits on top of it. Tech stack: Clojure, Javascript, React, Redux, AWS (ECS, Autoscaling, Aurora, RDS, SecretsManager, S3)

Roles: DevOps Engineer | Frontend Engineer - Growth | Front-end Software Engineer | Head of Talent | Software Engineer | Software Engineer in Test | Success Engineer

See https://www.metabase.com/jobs/

salsakran··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2021)
Metabase | https://metabase.com | REMOTE | Full-time | Backend, Frontend, Full Stack, and DevOps engineers We're hiring for multiple positions across the Engineering team (and in many other non-engineering roles). Metabase is open source analytics software that makes it easy to ask questions of your data. It interfaces with a number of databases / data warehouses (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Postgres, MySQL, etc) and has a simple and powerful UI and UX that sits on top of it.

Tech stack: Clojure, Javascript, React, Redux, AWS (ECS, Autoscaling, Aurora, RDS, SecretsManager, S3)

Roles: Data Analyst - Growth DevOps Engineer Frontend Engineer - Growth Front-end Software Engineer Head of Talent Product Manager - Growth Software Engineer Software Engineer in Test Success Engineer

See https://www.metabase.com/jobs/

salsakran··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (January 2021)
Metabase | Software Engineer, Product Manager, Product Marketer | San Francisco, CA | REMOTE, FULL-TIME | http://www.metabase.com/ We’re a small team building open source business intelligence tools with a strong focus on user experience. React frontend, Clojure backend. Most of the work we do is open source. We’re looking for - Frontend Engineers - Backend Engineers - DevOps Engineers - Product managers - Product marketers

If you love open source, building beautiful products, and working with data, apply at http://www.metabase.com/jobs

salsakran··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2020)
Metabase | Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | REMOTE, FULL-TIME | http://www.metabase.com/ We’re a small team building open source business intelligence tools with a strong focus on user experience. React frontend, Clojure backend. Most of the work we do is open source.

We’re looking for - Frontend Engineers - Backend Engineers - DevOps Engineers - Product managers - Product marketers

If you love open source, building beautiful products, and working with data, apply at http://www.metabase.com/jobs

salsakran··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2020)
Metabase | Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | REMOTE, FULL-TIME | http://www.metabase.com/ We’re a small team building open source business intelligence tools with a strong focus on user experience. React frontend, Clojure backend. Most of the work we do is open source.

We’re looking for - Frontend Engineers - Backend Engineers - DevOps Engineers - Product managers - Product marketers

If you love open source, building beautiful products, and working with data, apply at http://www.metabase.com/jobs

salsakran··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2020)
Metabase | Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE, REMOTE, FULL-TIME | http://www.metabase.com/ We’re a small team building open source business intelligence tools with a strong focus on user experience.

React frontend, Clojure backend. Most of the work we do is open source. We’re looking to hire strong frontend, backend, or generalist engineers.

If you love open source, building beautiful products, and working with data, apply at http://www.metabase.com/jobs

salsakran··on Show HN: Metabase Cloud
Yup! There's a command-line tool that snapshots your current site and lets you upload it to our hosted platform.
salsakran··on Show HN: Metabase Cloud
effectively, yes. For that tier, we give you a dedicated instance that runs the Metabase application and a dedicated instance for the application database
salsakran··on Show HN: Metabase Cloud
We've been working on a hosted version of Metabase for a while , and we're happy to formally pull back the covers.

Over the years we've tried to make self-hosting as easy as possible, but lots of companies have let us know they'd prefer a fully managed version of Metabase. So... here it is!

https://www.metabase.com/blog/Announcing-Metabase-Cloud/inde... has the official announcement, but if you have any questions, fire away =)

salsakran··on Launch HN: PostHog (YC W20) – open-source product analytics
This is awesome and long overdue. We (I'm the Metabase founder) have been working on the Business Intelligence side of things, but have always struggled in our own usage with the ubiquity of closed source solutions for event collection (read: Google Analytics) and the relative lack of attention on this problem on the open source side.
salsakran··on Insights – Open-Source Self-Hosted Business Intelligence Platform
I work on Metabase and wanted to say congrats on putting all this together. Excited to see more open source options for BI.

Just as a point of fact - that blog post you linked to is 3.5 years old at this point.

Even at that time we had implicit joins (for things like top grossing countries if you had an FK in your transactions back to a table w/ the country field).

We've had joins in our notebook mode for a while now (https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/users-guide/custom-ques...)

salsakran··on Ask HN: What does your BI stack look like?
Thanks!

-Another Metabase team member

salsakran··on Show HN: Poli – An easy-to-use, open-source BI alternative
I'm on the Metabase team -

We've walked a fine line between fixing bugs, adding the features that our users have asked for and building out the BI interface we think the world should be using in 5 years.

We don't always get it right, and I'm sorry if we broke things for you on the performance side.

We will be spending a few of our development cycles after 0.33 to try to clear out our bug queue.

One specific factual point I'd like to reply to however - SQL isn't going anywhere. If anything we're making it easier to both write plain SQL, use SQL templates or use our graphical interface on top of SQL query results in our next release (preview at https://github.com/metabase/metabase/releases/tag/v0.33.0-pr...)

salsakran··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2019)
Metabase | Software Engineer | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE, REMOTE, FULL-TIME | http://www.metabase.com/ We’re a small team building open source business intelligence tools with a strong focus on user experience.

React frontend, Clojure backend. Most of the work we do is open source. We’re looking to hire strong frontend, backend, or generalist engineers.

If you love open source, building beautiful products, and working with data, apply at http://www.metabase.com/jobs

salsakran··on Self-Hosted “SQL-Not-required” Data Analytics and BI Tool. Inspired by Looker
For what it's worth, you can do drill-through exploration with Metabase fair well. You can click on the graph and zoom-in, see underlying records, as well as re-pivot the result cell today

We also allow you to group by and filter by "joined" columns across foreign keys. We just never put the word "join" in front of end users. As far as users go, they just know that a transaction has a user and that they can filter by the user's country.

Regarding views vs joins, imo the entire point of doing SQL views (i.e. doing joins or transforms to create wide denormalized tables) is so that end users get a clean, explorable dataset they can understand. If you are dependent on doing 3-way joins in the BI tool then only people that know how to put together 3-way joins will use it.

What we've seen this over and over in companies that use Looker and move to us is that because only analysts or engineers can write LookML, every small modification goes through an engineer or analyst. With Metabase, for the most part, once you spend a bit of time cleaning up the data they see, people just figure things out on their own.

(blatant self promotion from a Metabase team member)

salsakran··on Self-Hosted “SQL-Not-required” Data Analytics and BI Tool. Inspired by Looker
We offer white label licenses for embedding, do a bit of hosting and are going to be launching adjacent (paid) products.

(another person from Metabase)

salsakran··on Redash – Connect to any data source, easily visualize and share your data
I'm one of the Metabase team, and for what it's worth, we support read-only users now!
salsakran··on Ask HN: I've been asked to sign a IP Assignment Deed as an employee
Chances are they messed up the paperwork somehow. Either the agreement you signed wasn't acceptable to the buyers or they just lost them.

I would definitely run it by a lawyer before you sign anything.

It's unlikely they're being nefarious, but realize that you'd be doing them a favor. It's up to you to decide if that's something you'd want to do.

salsakran··on Ask HN: Any open-source project in need of a Technical Writer?
We'd love your help at Metabase !(www.github.com/metabase/metabase)
salsakran··on Stack on a Budget – A collection of services with great free tiers
opened a PR!
salsakran··on Stack on a Budget – A collection of services with great free tiers
Is this only for SaaS free tiers or are completely free/Open source options ok?
salsakran··on Ask HN: How do detect a crappy boss / toxic environment when interviewing?
On some level, you never really know. People often behave differently when interviewing (or trying to close you) than normally, let alone during stressful periods.

The low hanging fruit here is:

* ALWAYS spend time with your future boss prior to accepting. Ideally try to spend as much time as you reasonably can. If this isn't possible push back pretty hard about why. Your direct manager is usually the biggest reason for your unhappiness at a job. "People don't leave jobs, they leave bosses" is a cliche for a reason.

* If people seem unhappy when you interview, don't assume it's just how they feel that day.

* Make sure you get a sense for the culture and whether you want to be part of it. If you're not into constant group activity, make sure you're not joining a hyper-intense "everyone hangs out with each other all the time" sort of place. Conversely if you're new in town, don't join a company where everyone is focused on working hyper efficiently and bouncing to go home to their families. Neither is right or wrong, but they can definitely be right or wrong for you.

* If you're connected, track down people who left the company and ask about your future boss. Were they hard to work with? Do people like them? If you have friends at the company (ideally, not reporting to your potential boss) ask about how your boss (and the department) is perceived by the rest of the company.

* Hit up linkedin and track down ex employees, ideally in the same job role. See where they ended up, and hit them up and ask why.

Good luck!

salsakran··on Airbnb open-sources Caravel: data exploration and visualization platform
Hey, Sameer from the Metabase team.

If you don't mind, I'd love to hear why you felt we were far from being ready for production.

Our main challenge has trading off ease of installation and use with the inevitable feature creep that causes the lots of moving parts and learning curve you find meh about Pentaho. You're right in that we've focused on making the most basic of sql queries (via our non-sql tool) usable by anyone in the company on their own vs essentially producing an analytics SDK like Pentaho/Jaspersoft.

On the language front, we made a conscious decision to optimize for ease of installation and low maintenance overhead. While I agree, it's made contributing less accessible, it's been amazing how porting has made Metabase more stable and easier to install. We run a bunch of instances for people, and our ops footprint has been silly small.

salsakran··on 3.67% of the most popular websites block Tor (because of Akamai and CloudFlare)
Many of the listed sites almost certainly block Tor to prevent large scale scraping.
salsakran··on SnappyData: OLTP and OLAP Database Built on Apache Spark
Looks very interesting!

Would you be interested in helping us write a SnappyData connector for Metabase? github.com/metabase/metabase

salsakran··on Metabase: Why we picked Clojure
precisely.

(author of the post)

salsakran··on Metabase: Why we picked Clojure
The fact that it wasn't an ORM was a huge win. We effectively had to build a dynamic ORM that modeled our end user's data warehouses which is a very different problem than a normal web app's database access patterns.
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