Trusted Housesitters matches people who have a pet and want to go on vacation with people who would like to take care of the pet while staying at the other persons house (usually for free).
I love it because we like to discover the world and meet new people in different cities. Due to the lifestyle we never wanted to get a dog or cat because we did not want to constrain our flexibility. Trusted Housesitters gives us the best of both worlds.
I am super glad that we found it. And to be honest, I don't know when we would have found it without Youtube ads. I was watching many videos on pet behavior and - boom - there was the ad and it was a match made in heaven.
I know many people are critical of ads and I also don't enjoy most of them. Thus, I wanted to point out this splendid example which changed my life for the better. Thank you, ads. And thank you, trusted housesitters for putting in the effort to find me because I did not imagine that something like this would exist.
I guess this is the opposite of "create a good product and customers will beat the path to you". This was more like "create a good product and invest money to find the people who like it and are willing to pay you back for it".
To be honest, we regularly refactor our architecture at bamboolib in order to make sure that there is almost no gap between what we would love to say in natural language and the code that we need to write.
This resulted in a very stable and clear internal API surface (read architecture). So, literally, all we had to do was adding mount points where users could register their plugins and then include those at render time.
The next day, customers could write plugins just as we did. And, as a matter of fact, all the bamboolib transformations, visualizations, views, etc are just sophisticated plugins that our customers could write themselves because they have access to the same API as we do.
So, no secret sauce except for "good architecture" which is easiest achieved as an ongoing effort rather than an one-off project.
I guess in this specific case at hand, companies can switch between bamboolib, mito, dtale and it is less likely that all of them will become unavailable at the same time. The switch is also not so hard because there are no underlying proprietary file formats involved (except for bamboolib plugins) because the generated code is pandas, plotly, etc.
Similarly as described below/above: counter-intuitively, the availability of open-source LibreCalc makes it easier and safer to adopt closed-source Excel.
I can totally relate that finding a suitable open-source business model is a fuzzy journey.
Nevertheless, from the user perspective I would love to hear a more clear answer - at least for e.g. the next 6-12 months.
Currently, it seems like you are tolerating usage inside the cloud providers without taking a clear stance. I think this creates fear, uncertainty, doubt and slows down mito adoption within the cloud.
I would appreciate a clear statement in the near future around your thinking on how mito should be made available in those environments. After all, the clouds are an environment to where more and more users are migrating to. Or at least use it in parallel to local setups.
I can understand if you don't want to answer on the spot in case you don't have a clear stance yet. In this case, please take your time and let us know when you made your decision.
Really love what you're doing and the innovation that you are pushing for! <3
Thanks for mentioning Altair. I am personally also a big fan.
I am one of the co-founders of bamboolib and we are actively thinking about adding support for altair to the Plot Creator (instead of just relying on Plotly).
Since we are talking other viz options in Python, there are of course also matplotlib, seaborn, plotly, and more.
It's correct that bamboolib is (still) closed-source (which might be subject to change but I don't make promises).
It's also correct that customers can extend the bamboolib UI in various ways via plugins that they can author themselves. That empowers them to build bamboolib into the kind of tool that they want.
Also, all the code is always exported and thus, there is at least no "code lockin".
Regarding being "at their mercy", I can say that there are many customers who are happy by the service that we provide.
To the founders of mito, regarding the mito GPL license:
What is your take on that regarding usage inside cloud provider's notebooks like AWS, GCP, Azure, Databricks?
Is it allowed or not allowed by the license? And who should/can control the usage since users can install any kind of Python library in those environments.
And, separately from the maybe ambiguous legal answer: What is your personal intention with the license?
I love how mito enables companies to use the power of open-source!
You might want to think about enabling companies to create the company specific extensions themselves e.g. via a plugin API. You might still request them to pay for this version of Mito but they are enabled to extend it with their engineering power instead of relying on you.
We had good experiences with this at bamboolib (I am one of the co-founders) and in addition to recurring license revenue it also increased demand for consulting from our end because the internal company devs started working on plugins and then wanted our direct guidance on how to get the more tricky things to work.
Yes, I am one of the co-founders of bamboolib and employed by Databricks.
I already added my disclosure to the following answer [0] in this thread but I was hesitant to add it to every answer.
Do you prefer if I explicitly add my affiliation in every comment that mentions bamboolib? If so, I will try to edit them (if the HN UI still allows me to - I observed that it stops allowing this after some time)
If you want to use open-source Python-based visualizations instead of Tableau, the following tools allow the creation of custom plots - including the ability to export the underlying code.
- bamboolib (proprietary license - acquired by Databricks in order to run within the Databricks notebooks)
If you are a large company trying to migrate to Python, you might also want to have a look at bamboolib.com which was acquired by Databricks.
bamboolib is very similar to mito (hard to tell who was first).
The advantage is that it runs within Databricks which gives you the ability to scale to any amount of data easily and Databricks has many (and growing) security certifications e.g. HIPAA compliance.
bamboolib can be used in plain Jupyter. Also, bamboolib private preview within Databricks is about to start within the next days.
Full disclosure: I am a co-founder of bamboolib and employed by Databricks