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by cube2222 1476 days ago
I recommend adding telemetry to your project for this (and I know a lot of people feel strongly about this, so I'll add: with a very easy way of disabling it).

In OctoSQL[0] I'm literally just sending JSON files with coarse information about 1. invocations of the CLI, 2. features used in these invocations, to a VM on DigitalOcean (with a 10-line server receiving them and writing to a JSON file - which I can then process using OctoSQL itself).

Thanks to this I knew that until recently most of what I had were stars, not actual usage, and could also see how the big rewrite I released in January (and the following updates) made a lot of people start actually using it since. Very nice feeling :)

All telemetry logic in OctoSQL is actually contained in a single short file[1].

PS: Keep in mind that https requests take a long time, as they need to do a few roundtrips for the TLS handshake. Don't do that on every invocation if you have latency-sensitive invocations. I.e. in OctoSQL I'm only sending aggregated telemetry data every 10 invocations (as well as on the very first one).

[0]:https://github.com/cube2222/octosql

[1]:https://github.com/cube2222/octosql/blob/main/telemetry/tele...
2 comments
nyellin 1476 days ago
Octosql looks very cool! Thanks for posting.

Also agree with you about telemetry. We send some minimal telemetry in Robusta (also easily disabled) and it's been a big help for us as a project.

https://github.com/robusta-dev/robusta

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dataangel 1476 days ago
do you warn users about the telemetry? OSS users and developers in particular are pretty hostile to it, especially when it's default
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cube2222 1476 days ago
Please judge for yourself in this asciinema I've just uploaded whether it's enough of a warning: https://asciinema.org/a/eWQsyXQKi1fmithyTekAD5fWS
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natebc 1476 days ago
That is a very clear and helpful message.

You may want to consider mentioning it in the README.md as well and alongside any example/default configuration you generate indicating the default state and setting to disable it, especially if it's only output the first time it writes the telemetry history.

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