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by simonw 1815 days ago
https://meltano.com/ right now says:

"ELT for the DataOps era

Meltano is open source, self-hosted, CLI-first, debuggable, and extensible."

That doesn't tell me what Meltano is.

I happen to recognise "ELT" as "Extract, load, transform" but I imagine a lot of people would have to look up the acronym.

I hadn't seen the term DataOps before, despite working in this area. DevOps for Data? But the definition of DevOps itself is still pretty vague!

I know how hard it is to explain what a product like this does - I'm definitely not there with my own https://datasette.io/ project yet - but what you've got right now could definitely do with some improvement.

Here's my attempt for Meltano, based on a very loose understanding of what it is:

"Meltano is an open-source tool for building automated pipelines for extracting and converting data. Pipelines are defined using version-controlled code, and the framework can be extended using plugins written in Python."

This really isn't very good, but it does fill in the questions that I had when I first visited https://meltano.com/

1 comments

Thanks! This is really useful feedback. To date, Meltano has been geared towards data folks who are likely to understand these concepts and acronyms, but there's definitely a need to explain it for folks who aren't as familiar. We're going to be working on the website copy in the coming weeks to make it easier to understand with as little digging as possible. If you think of anything else please feel free to reach out to us.