Dealing With Time Travelers in Analytics

It's not enough to just have an analytics infrastructure for real-time online actions. The proliferation of mobile and international expansions means analytics platforms must also account for offline actions while ensuring that it does not harm user experience. At WordPress.com, we are building and scaling an analytic infrastructure to satisfy the dual mandate of accepting arbitrarily ordered events while efficiently coalesce them for querying. Here's what we've learned on our journey towards a lambda architecture.

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1. xyu@automattic.com  @HypertextRanch  xyu.io  xyu  Dealing With Time Travelers in Analytics Xiao Yu / Automattic
2.   
3.  
4.    VaultPress Jetpack Simplenote Akismet Polldaddy Gravatar VideoPress IntenseDebate Simperium Code Poet Cloudup WooCommerce Longreads WordPress.com WordPress.com VIP
5. –No One Ever “Gee... I really like watching a spinner go round and round.”
6. 100ms Delay → 62 Years Wasted 100ms Delay
8. Better Page Speed → More Conversions
9. Emerging Markets & Mobile More Latencies & Less Bandwidth
10. Data Scientist Performance Engineer
11. –Sage Advice “You can't improve what you can't measure.”
12. Data Scientist Performance Engineer • Load pre-render • Add callback to all actions • Wait for successful response • Lazy load • Track only minimum required • Send via background task
13.  Don’t Block The Critical Path
14.  Don’t Block The Critical Path Build Optimistic UIs
15.  Don’t Block The Critical Path Build Optimistic UIs Build Native Apps
16. Client Speed — Don’t Block
17. <script> window._tkq = window._tkq || []; window._tkq.push( [ 'recordEvent', 'wpcom_post_edit', { custom_data: '…' } ] ); </script> <script> window._tkq = window._tkq || []; window._tkq.push( [ 'recordEvent', 'wpcom_post_edit', { custom_data: '…' } ] ); </script>
18. <script> window._tkq = window._tkq || []; window._tkq.push( [ 'recordEvent', 'wpcom_post_edit', { custom_data: '…' } ] ); </script> <script> window._tkq = window._tkq || []; window._tkq.push( [ 'recordEvent', 'wpcom_post_edit', { custom_data: '…' } ] ); </script>
19. <script> window._tkq = window._tkq || []; window._tkq.push( [ 'recordEvent', 'wpcom_post_edit', { custom_data: '…' } ] ); </script> … <script src = '//stats.wp.com/w.js' async defer ></script> <script> window._tkq = window._tkq || []; window._tkq.push( [ 'recordEvent', 'wpcom_post_edit', { custom_data: '…' } ] ); </script> … <script src = '//stats.wp.com/w.js' async defer ></script>
20. –Einstein “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
22. Faster Analytics → 11.7% Bump in Conversions
23. Client guarantees events are sent at-least once; servers cleans up data and does everything else.
24. Clients tell us when events happened…
25. Clients tell us when events happened… but
 client clocks are unreliable.
26. Event A Event B ?
27. Ȑ Ȑ Ȑ Ȑ Ȑ Ȑ Morphine
28. Client Clock Server Clock
 10 20 21
 22 32 10
29. Client Clock Server Clock
 10 11 20 21
 22 32 10
30. 
31. 
32. Now T-9
33. Ȑ Ȑ Ȑ Ȑ Ȑ Ȑ Morphine
34. Morphine
35. https://automattic.com/work-with-us/data-wrangler/
36. xyu@automattic.com  @HypertextRanch  xyu.io  xyu  Thanks!