Analyze This!
Metrics are hot these days! They can help determine business direction, drive design and marketing decisions (where does this rounded button go?, and appease investors with hard numbers. For web trafficking insight, Rails apps can (and should) leverage 3rd party products such as Google Analytics. In addition, many apps can benefit from an in house reporting implementation, whether it is to provide additional metrics, report up to the minute real-time information, or to overcome 3rd party limitations.
This presentation discusses:
- Successfully using 3rd party tools including Google Analytics
- When to roll your own metrics implementation, and how to do it
- Available technologies including rails gems and plugins and working with both nosql and sql data stores.
- Gotchas such as counting unique users, counting page cached actions, optimizing database interaction
- Creating attractive reports
- Tips and tricks to ensure optimal performance and scalability
Finally, we will examine in depth two large scale rails analytics implementations as case studies.
- Spongecell Ads: parsing and compiling over 2.5 million impressions an hour via nginx logs
- Z2Live: Using mongodb in the clouds as a centralized analytics store for iphone requests
Blythe Dunham
Spongecell
Blythe Dunham is snowgiraffe, a Seattle based code cowgirl at z2live and co-founder of Spongecell. 4 years ago when she began developing with this “Ruby on Rails”, most of her friends thought it was a new snowboarding trick. A certified database whisperer, she specializes in back-end server and database performance and scalability, and most recently has focused on large scale rails analytics implementations. Blythe is excited to share some of the cool new technologies and scalability tricks she incorporated into these implementations.
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Comments
projector* not project…
This talk had potential but the project issues/shaky mic made it a bit hard to follow. I’d love to see the slides from the talk if those get posted though.
Maybe too high-level. I was interested to see more code examples or a more thorough list of gotchas.
Blythe’s content was excellent.
To improve, some more details in the slides would be nice (like names of useful plugins in the slides that are on screen when she mentions them).
The parts where she talked spontaneously showed her genuine excitement and were easier to hear.