Data visualisation tool for journalists & other publishers. Used by NYT, Washington Post, AP, and many others. You’ve likely seen a Datawrapper visualization before - election results, Covid numbers, maps on world events, etc. are created using Datawrapper. We are reaching >200 million unique visualisation viewers with a team of under 20 people. Bootstrapped, profitable.
Stack is NodeJS backend with Svelte frontend and D3/Svelte visualizations.
How does it work for you to be on-call 24/7 for escalation? I get that that ends up happening for many committed founders/operators/managers, but I struggle how that can be a real strategy.
Are you never off-grid for a bit, or drunk in a bar, or just on a real no-work vacation? There seem to be situations where being on call just isn’t feasible.
I was effectively oncall 24/7 at my job at times in 2020.
I barely noticed the pandemic. I never strayed far from my computer. Also, yes, I tried not to drink much.
I certainly learned what my limits are. People think I am a pretty good engineer (not amazing) but what I am known for is being able to keep that level of performance up for a long time.
For my part, despite my reputation, I tried to quit a few times. Not the job, the company entirely. I have never cried at work, but came close once or twice after being up for days and unwinding from a big escalation.
I think it’s a little disrespectful to resurrect someone’s comment they tried to delete. It’s their comment, and we don’t know their reasons for deleting it.
I'm from PeopleSoft / ERP world. The same PeopleSoft HCM base application would generate one off-hours pager alert a month at one client; and half a dozen a night at another client; due to different customization/implementation/complexity of business logic and data.
Any on-call/on-shift rotation system must be viewed through the lens of actual demand and need.
At first client, we had 3-4 developers total who shared pagers on weekly basis, as per the OP, with no undue stress or impact on their day job.
At second client, we now have multi-tier support starting with on-shift (junior but specialized ops team members who stare at computer overnight and provide immediate response), Tier 1 and Tier 2 on-call support, and multi-level escalation rotation.
And yes, there are still people who get woken up all the time always, because buck eventually stops there :-/ . Being on call sucks, as per the title. I've been in 24x7 escalation roles; I don't drink to begin with so that's not an issue, but it absolutely had significant negative impact on my social & family life, sleep and stress levels. I've spent significant effort to a) Make the system better, both in terms of more reliable application, and deeper and more self-sufficient support team tree, and b) Move myself out of the role, though that relies on success in a).
I do find it fascinating to occasionally meet very senior people, with family and social life, who are positively EAGER to be on-call and engaged for every little thing all the time always - and then, unfortunately, have same expectations of literally everybody else ("Let's all come on bridge, always, for everything, anytime")
Another data point from a startup, we have a few people also globally distributed on on-call, we use each other as backups in case as the commenter suggested you're drunk at a bar or camping. Our site doesn't break much (haven't had an incident for over a month now, maybe something happens once every 1-3 months and it's usually not severe) and we have redundancy in the schedule so we've come to not feel so neurotic about it.
Even in all the situations you’ve listed, I still have my phone with me.
If I’m going to be out of cell coverage (e.g. a plane ride, or in the countryside with spotty Internet) or simply want to be left alone, I usually plan for that in advance and do a combination of: 1) scaling back our risk exposure by rescheduling work (which requires you to have a good understanding of the business, its needs, and its timelines) and 2) shoring up the bits I feel most weary about through code, documentation, tooling, and/or contractors.
The same goes for the team SMEs: reschedule where I can, crosstrain where I can’t, get headcount where none of the prior work.
I’ve been on call since 1999. I had to figure out a pattern that worked for me (and my family) but wouldn’t result in a life that was boring or worse, one that I resented.
I’m paged if the two people on call both fail to ack, which is extraordinarily rare.
But what it’s there for is if the team is experiencing something that is new/novel (where I can provide some targeted guidance) or the situation is spiraling and will get worse before it gets better (where I can provide air cover).
I'm a little amused - I really wouldn't have expected "get a puppie at the same time" as advice for someone who'll have their first child in two months. Particularly coming from somebody who who has been in that situation themselves. But I never had kids, so what do I know!
Data visualisation tool for journalists & other publishers. Used by NYT, Washington Post, AP, and many others. You’ve likely seen a Datawrapper visualization before - election results, Covid numbers, maps on world events, etc. are created using Datawrapper. We are reaching >200 million unique visualisation viewers with a team of under 20 people. Bootstrapped, profitable.
Stack is NodeJS backend with Svelte frontend and D3/Svelte visualizations.
The demand for gelatine would contribute to the pig meat revenue stream, offsetting costs and thereby (at least ever so slightly) decreasing the cost of pork, leading (in theory) to increased consumption.
Whether that effect is large enough to be noticeable is questionable, and I definitely agree there could be "better choices", but it's not exactly right to say that it has no impact.
If its like with whey, its in such abundance that they pay people to buy it. Either way, the revenue stream would be very little higher because of the huge abundance. You're much better off simply eating less pig meat.
Congrats on the launch, Render team! Like so many others here, I was a former Heroku user turned AWS-customer that is longing for an option with the positioning, UX/DX that Heroku offered ten years ago.
There's this bit of copywriting I see on many startup landing pages that annoys me a bit:
"You can now set up a Redis instance in just a few clicks and let Render handle the heavy lifting to operate it reliably and securely."
To me, it always feels somewhat patronizing to refer to yourself as doing 'heavy lifting' and the customer's work as (obviously) not-quite-as-heavy-lifting. Maybe in particular because I've set up Redis in the past, and as many others have mentioned it is really the epitome of hassle-free, easy-to-setup server software. So referring to hosting Redis as heavy lifting just kind of feels wrong or over the top.
It's interesting that people begin to realize now to which ridiculous conclusions GDPR taken at its word leads:
- IP addresses are personally identifiable information (PII), and hence require consent to process
- Transferring PII to servers outside of Europe, or servers owned by organizations with legal residence outside of Europe (aka American tech companies), is not allowed
That means it is non-compliant to host your website at e.g. AWS, because it would mean AWS has technical means of accessing your customer's IP addresses, and AWS is owned by an American company. It doesn't matter whether you use a EU-based data center, because he jurisdiction of the parent company matters. This effectively rules out AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and of course pretty much all CDN providers.
> - IP addresses are personally identifiable information
I really thought you were going to go in a different direction than this. This is very obvious and there's nothing ridiculous about it. To most people in the EU, an IP address gives a very high resolution to a person.
> That means it is non-compliant to host your website at e.g. AWS
Yes, this is correct. AWS, Azure and GCP cannot possibly be compliant. It's taking everyone a while to figure this out. There's nothing wrong with that, privacy-sensitive information should never touch the US. No US-based company can guarantee your privacy.
> effectively everyone is non-compliant.
This is of course hyperbole. If you don't log or track you are perfectly compliant in every case.
> If you don't log or track you are perfectly compliant in every case.
But that is simply not true, right? If I host my website on AWS and 'log or track' nothing I am still not compliant. It's not about what I do as a website provider, it's effectively outlawing working with companies based in other jurisdictions.
To save you the click, it's Andorra, Argentina, Canada, Faroe Islands, Guernsey, Israel, Isle of Man, Japan, Jersey, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Uruguay.
You can use a provider from anywhere, as long as you know they do not track.
"The effect of such a decision is that personal data can flow from the EU (and Norway, Liechtenstein and Iceland) to that third country without any further safeguard being necessary."
operant words being "without any further safeguard".
> It's weird how the whole "you need to keep your users' data safe and not collect more than is necessary" is such a controversial topic for some on HN.
I think it stems from a long lawless time online where everyone was free to aggressively exploit everyone else. The fact that such behaviour is becoming frowned upon is something that we should expect will generate some friction. That said, I also find it hard to empathise with.
My impression was they can very much be compliant as long as they sign a contract with you that they only process data themselves in manner compliant with GDPR in the services you make available for EU citizens.
> If you don't log or track you are perfectly compliant in every case
The GDPR is not merely a list of bad things not to do. You must also hire people to carry out slow and expensive processes to continually demonstrate compliance, e.g., https://gdpr-info.eu/art-36-gdpr/.
GDPR says IP Addresses are personal data, although this is a clarification of a previous court ruling.
Personal data does NOT need consent to process. Consent is only necessary in a minority of cases, and certainly not regular website access. The idea that GDPR <==> is a misunderstanding. (This is closer to true when dealing with website cookies, because of a different and stupider law.)
GDPR does not prevent transferring data outside of Europe. It just says that data privacy must be respected, in one of a variety of ways. The problem is the US CLOUD Act, which basically says US companies are bound by US law even when operating in other jurisdictions. EU Courts have ruled that US companies bound by the CLOUD Act cannot safeguard data. And they aren't wrong.
By comparison, data transfers to the UK or Japan require nothing more than putting the words "adequacy decision" in your privacy policy. This is because those countries have laws safeguard privacy, as opposed to laws safeguarding law enforcement's access to personal data.
What my original statement meant to convey was not simply disagreement with GDPR, but more that two somewhat unrelated edge case decisions ("do 'just' IP addresses count as PII", and "can one work with American suppliers") gave this regulation a scope that I believe wasn't even intended by the original lawmakers (as evident by their own failure to be compliant, see other comment thread), and that very much goes against the realities of the Internet of the past 25 years.
That being said, your corrections are valid and give a more precise description of the situation rather than my initial comment.
That's a fair point. At the time GDPR was passed, there was an Adequacy Decision in place (Privacy Shield), so the political expectation was that US<->EU data transfers would be OK.
One way of looking at things is that the political landscape ("we can work with the US") were not in alignment with the legal landscape (US law does not prioritize privacy safeguards). Max Schrems & noyb are forcing Europe to reconcile that schism and bring practice into alignment with legal requirements rather than political requirements. This is causing disruption, but I'm of the mind that it's not unjust, it's a matter of finally having to pay the piper.
Choose an EU-based webhosting provider, don't use "the usual suspects" in regards of tracking or run your own Matomo instance and save as little data as necessary.
One data point, that I just found after a few clicks: Homepage of the 'Council of the European Union' (https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/). On opening, loads resources from 'newsroomcdnakamai.azureedge.net'.
If compliance is such a breeze, I wonder why the very institutions that took part in creating those regulations are not able to comply (after almost 5 years now)?
Are you sure newsroomcdnakamai.azureedge.net is non-compliant?
From client IPs within the EU, that domain resolves to EU-based hosting locations, so it's plausible that all of the PII protections and contracts are in place.
Yes: the point is that it is owned & controlled by Microsoft. The actual location of the data processing doesn't matter if the parent company is bound to US jurisdiction (which Microsoft is).
Awesome! Sounds super interesting, would be curious to learn more about your workflow (and maybe we can help somehow). Email in my profile if you’re interested!
In terms of in-between projects, if comfortable with a bit of programming I would probably look at Vega Lite [0] or Observable Plot [1]. For GUI tools, there’s also the excellent RAW Graphs [2] to consider!
Data visualisation tool for journalists & other publishers. Used by NYT, Washington Post, AP, and many others. You’ve likely seen a Datawrapper visualization before - election results, Covid numbers, maps on world events, etc. are created using Datawrapper. We are reaching >200 million unique visualisation viewers with a team of under 20 people. Bootstrapped, profitable.
Stack is NodeJS backend with Svelte frontend and D3/Svelte visualizations.
https://www.datawrapper.de
Feel free to reach out personally to david at datawrapper.de