Mixpanel

Evolution of code deployment tools at Mixpanel

At Mixpanel, we’ve had our ups and downs with the cloud. We moved off the cloud back in 2011 to dedicated hardware deployed on Softlayer. Although we got rid of some of the noisy neighbor problems we…

Power-of-2-Choices in Practice

Access patterns dictate how data should be stored. Frequently written data should be in a row-oriented format, while frequently queried data should be in a column oriented format. Mixpanel’s in-house…

A Study in a Mixpanel Engineer’s Engineering Progress

I’m Tiffany, a Product Engineer at Mixpanel, and have been an engineer here for a year and a half. I’ve been tracking various time and Github data for fun during my time here and I thought I’d share…

Dynamic Configuration at Mixpanel

Your code is often powered by many constants and configurations. Imagine passing this static configuration to your code: You wrote your code with this static config and deployed it to 100 machines…

Straightening our Backbone: A lesson in event-driven UI development

Mixpanel’s web UI is built out of small pieces. Our Unix-inspired development philosophy favors the integration of lightweight, independent apps and components instead of the monolithic mega-app…

Live Downsizing Google Cloud Persistent Disks for Fun and Profit

At Mixpanel, we heavily utilize Google Cloud Platform(GCP)’s SSD provisioned persistent disk (PD-SSD) to store the event data that underlies our service. We chose it to support our low-latency…

Safely Rewriting Mixpanel’s Highest Throughput Service in Golang

It’s always important to use the right tool. I grew up working on small outboard engines with my father and learned this lesson the hard way. I only had to strip a bolt once to realize that using the…

Diagnosing networking issues in the Linux Kernel

A few weeks ago we started noticing a dramatic change in the pattern of network traffic hitting our tracking API servers in Washington DC. From a fairly stable daily pattern, we started seeing spikes…

Feb 2015 Mixpanel C++ meetup: Fun with Lambdas (Effective Modern C++ chapter 6)

We’ve been hosting a series of monthly meetups on C++ programming topics. The theme of the series is a chapter-by-chapter reading of Scott Meyers’ new book, “Effective Modern C++”. Next up, we’ll be…

Building a (not so simple) expression language part II: Scope

One of the most powerful parts of the Mixpanel query language is the operator, which allows you to select events or profiles based on the value of any element in a list. The operator is just a bit…

Building a simple expression language

The Mixpanel reporting API is built around a custom expression language that customers (and our main reporting application) can use to slice and dice their data. The expression language is a simple…

Safely Rewriting Mixpanel’s Highest Throughput Service in Golang

It’s always important to use the right tool. I grew up working on small outboard engines with my father and learned this lesson the hard way. I only had to strip a bolt once to realize that using the almost-right tool could result in a mistake that took hours to correct. At Mixpanel, we try … Safely Rewriting Mixpanel’s Highest Throughput Service in GolangRead More »

Petabyte Scale Data Deduplication

This blog discusses Mixpanel's distributed de-duplication architecture that leverages Mixpanel's lambda architecture to de-duplicate events at query time.

A Study in a Mixpanel Engineer’s Engineering Progress

I’m Tiffany, a Product Engineer at Mixpanel, and have been an engineer here for a year and a half. I’ve been tracking various time and Github data for fun during my time here and I thought I’d share my results to start a conversation and be completely transparent about how engineers spend their time, and … A Study in a Mixpanel Engineer’s Engineering ProgressRead More »

The state of UI testing at Mixpanel

End-to-end tests At Mixpanel, we’ve been writing UI tests for a long time. However, they haven’t always been easy to set up, write, and debug. When we first began testing the UI, we wrote tests in Python using the Selenium framework. In this setup, the Python tests interact with the browser through the API provided … The state of UI testing at MixpanelRead More »

Live Downsizing Google Cloud Persistent Disks for Fun and Profit

Background At Mixpanel, we heavily utilize Google Cloud Platform(GCP)’s SSD provisioned persistent disk (PD-SSD) to store the event data that underlies our service. We chose it to support our low-latency analytics database, which serves customer queries. We found one major problem with PD-SSD: the cost. PD-SSD is 5x the cost per GB stored than Google … Live Downsizing Google Cloud Persistent Disks for Fun and ProfitRead More »

Making Web Components Work

or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DOM   Clean, attractive user interfaces and effective user experience have always been pillars of Mixpanel’s products. Over the years, as our data visualization UIs have introduced richer interactions and more advanced capabilities, a central concern of ours has been managing ever-increasing front-end complexity, driving … Making Web Components WorkRead More »

Building a (not so simple) expression language part II: Scope

(This is part II of a two part series of posts, you can find part I here) One of the most powerful parts of the Mixpanel query language is the [crayon-5e7c1b39a1794899630482-i/]  operator, which allows you to select events or profiles based on the value of any element in a list. The [crayon-5e7c1b39a17a0505332525-i/]  operator is just a bit … Building a (not so simple) expression language part II: ScopeRead More »

Straightening our Backbone: A lesson in event-driven UI development

Mixpanel’s web UI is built out of small pieces. Our Unix-inspired development philosophy favors the integration of lightweight, independent apps and components instead of the monolithic mega-app approach still common in web development. Explicit rather than implicit, direct rather than abstract, simple rather than magical: with these in-house programming ideals, it’s little surprise that we … Straightening our Backbone: A lesson in event-driven UI developmentRead More »

Diagnosing networking issues in the Linux Kernel

A few weeks ago we started noticing a dramatic change in the pattern of network traffic hitting our tracking API servers in Washington DC. From a fairly stable daily pattern, we started seeing spikes of 300-400 Mbps, but our rate of legitimate traffic (events and people updates) was unchanged. Pinning down the source of this … Diagnosing networking issues in the Linux KernelRead More »

Building data products that people will actually use

This was originally posted on High Scalability. Building data products is not easy. Many people are uncomfortable with numbers, and even more don’t really understand statistics. It’s very, very easy to overwhelm people with numbers, charts, and tables – and yet numbers are more important than ever. The trend toward running companies in a data-driven … Building data products that people will actually useRead More »