Meeting Title: ReadMe <> Brainforge Check-In Date: 2025-11-13 Meeting participants: Parliament Conference Room, Robert Tseng, Uttam Kumaran
WEBVTT
1 00:00:45.730 ⇒ 00:00:48.140 Parliament Conference Room: Charlotte. Hi!
2 00:00:48.690 ⇒ 00:00:50.259 Robert Tseng: Hey, Alicia. Hey, Mark.
3 00:00:52.260 ⇒ 00:00:55.279 Parliament Conference Room: Is Utam gonna join as well?
4 00:00:55.280 ⇒ 00:00:57.299 Robert Tseng: Yeah, yeah, 3 times training.
5 00:00:58.120 ⇒ 00:00:59.419 Robert Tseng: Let’s give him a minute.
6 00:01:12.800 ⇒ 00:01:15.410 Robert Tseng: Packed office today, it looks like, in the back.
7 00:01:15.410 ⇒ 00:01:25.420 Parliament Conference Room: It’s lunchtime. Okay. I mean, packed office for us is, like, 8 people, so it’s not that big, but yeah. Okay.
8 00:01:25.560 ⇒ 00:01:26.100 Parliament Conference Room: Yeah.
9 00:01:26.100 ⇒ 00:01:33.499 Robert Tseng: I don’t recall that table being there. I mean, I feel like configuration’s changed. You added a couch to this room, and you pushed… you made… put a table out there.
10 00:01:33.650 ⇒ 00:01:38.469 Parliament Conference Room: It’s, it’s our dining table. Nice. Yeah.
11 00:01:38.470 ⇒ 00:01:43.230 Robert Tseng: Okay, so… Long, long table, big family style kind of thing.
12 00:01:43.230 ⇒ 00:01:50.009 Parliament Conference Room: Exactly. Forced conversations, just the way we like it.
13 00:01:51.540 ⇒ 00:01:54.980 Robert Tseng: Yeah, let me, just run down my gum.
14 00:01:56.970 ⇒ 00:01:57.770 Robert Tseng: Okay.
15 00:02:09.300 ⇒ 00:02:10.589 Parliament Conference Room: Yes, ma’am.
16 00:02:55.670 ⇒ 00:02:57.240 Parliament Conference Room: Hi!
17 00:02:57.240 ⇒ 00:02:58.549 Uttam Kumaran: Hey, how’s it going?
18 00:02:58.890 ⇒ 00:03:03.110 Uttam Kumaran: Sorry, my Wi-Fi just cut out, like, in the last 5 minutes. Very timely.
19 00:03:03.110 ⇒ 00:03:05.550 Parliament Conference Room: It happens.
20 00:03:05.950 ⇒ 00:03:12.589 Parliament Conference Room: So I wanted to introduce you guys to Mark, put some faces to names,
21 00:03:12.830 ⇒ 00:03:28.280 Parliament Conference Room: I know we’ve been going back and forth about how to do some of this funnel verification, so I figured it’s easier to just talk live. So, maybe you guys can walk through, like, where you are, or where you believe you’re stuck, and then we can go from there.
22 00:03:28.900 ⇒ 00:03:29.430 Parliament Conference Room: Okay.
23 00:03:29.430 ⇒ 00:03:43.369 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, definitely. So yeah, Mark, the biggest thing we want to do is, either be able to query, like, directly in sort of a SQL environment, or be able to run sort of, like, the Mongo export function to move
24 00:03:43.420 ⇒ 00:03:52.600 Uttam Kumaran: you know, the subset of projects, plans, and users into an area where we can query. Doing that in the Mongo UI is a little bit tough.
25 00:03:52.840 ⇒ 00:04:03.310 Uttam Kumaran: It’s just very restrictive, so I would love to be able to either run some of that analysis in a cursor, so in, like, a VS Code environment, or…
26 00:04:03.310 ⇒ 00:04:07.270 Parliament Conference Room: They… they also allow… I don’t know what their desktop Compass app.
27 00:04:07.330 ⇒ 00:04:15.750 Uttam Kumaran: allows for either. But I think for both of those, I would need that sort of DB,
28 00:04:15.900 ⇒ 00:04:19.649 Uttam Kumaran: DB access, just because the default UI for…
29 00:04:20.390 ⇒ 00:04:23.580 Uttam Kumaran: Mongo aquaring is, like, really, really slim.
30 00:04:24.670 ⇒ 00:04:40.200 Parliament Conference Room: Yeah, I think that our concern is… and I’m not the security person, right? So, like, it’s not a separate opinion, but, like, we’re a little hesitant to, like, kind of, move customer data out of, like, a system that we control. Sure. So, like, that’s kind of our hesitation.
31 00:04:40.540 ⇒ 00:04:52.349 Parliament Conference Room: I know the Mongo UI does have ability to do, like, aggregations, which should get you everything you need. Like, you can, you know, combine data from all the different tables, and combine them into, like, run any operation you want on them.
32 00:04:53.070 ⇒ 00:05:05.540 Parliament Conference Room: it might not be performance, but that’s probably more just our Mongo setup trying to, like, query outside of the indexes, but, like, I think theoretically, any… Mongo’s a database, right? Any query that you can do in the Mongo database, you can do in the UI there.
33 00:05:05.540 ⇒ 00:05:06.270 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.
34 00:05:06.270 ⇒ 00:05:10.900 Parliament Conference Room: So if there’s, like, a specific, like, type of query, or a specific query that you’re, like, trying to…
35 00:05:11.180 ⇒ 00:05:14.030 Parliament Conference Room: run. I could try to help with how we can do that.
36 00:05:14.030 ⇒ 00:05:14.700 Uttam Kumaran: Okay.
37 00:05:15.240 ⇒ 00:05:17.160 Parliament Conference Room: But, yeah, I’m not sure.
38 00:05:17.160 ⇒ 00:05:33.509 Uttam Kumaran: That makes sense. Yeah, that’s fair. It’s just gonna be a bit tougher, so I’m happy to just try to do as much as we can in the UI. If there are queries that maybe I can get your help to run, again, we’re… we’re mainly just… we’re trying to run just some aggregate, so we’re not necessarily looking at individual folks.
39 00:05:33.510 ⇒ 00:05:42.740 Uttam Kumaran: But yeah, if I can maybe… if I have… I’m having trouble running some of those, or I would need that level access, maybe I can have you run them and just give us, like, what the summary information is.
40 00:05:43.150 ⇒ 00:05:46.980 Parliament Conference Room: Yeah, and as I said, like, you can do all… let me share my screen really quick.
41 00:05:50.750 ⇒ 00:06:10.929 Parliament Conference Room: like, sometimes I know the UI can be a little hard to navigate, but, like, there’s this page for, like, aggregations, which should let you, like, do, like, the pipeline aggregation type stuff in this UI. There’s also, like, a UI for it as well, which lets you, you know, query anything, combine the data, like, and get the output, and then gives you, like, a sample of documents as well. Okay. Theoretically, this should work. I mean.
42 00:06:10.930 ⇒ 00:06:11.250 Parliament Conference Room: Okay.
43 00:06:11.250 ⇒ 00:06:18.439 Parliament Conference Room: Depends on how complicated you’re trying to get. It might run into restrictions with, like, timeouts or stuff, but that will also be a problem.
44 00:06:18.550 ⇒ 00:06:27.979 Parliament Conference Room: like, outside of this UI as well, I think it’s a database thing, right? So, sure. So, like, theoretically, like, this space here should support everything you’re doing.
45 00:06:28.390 ⇒ 00:06:39.259 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, yeah, I’ve just been used to running stuff in, in VS Code before when accessing Mongo, so I can… yeah, I could go ahead and see what, see what we can do there, so that’s fine.
46 00:06:39.670 ⇒ 00:06:41.830 Uttam Kumaran: So I can kind of make progress on that today.
47 00:06:42.130 ⇒ 00:06:53.749 Parliament Conference Room: Okay, that’d be awesome. And just to reiterate, so, like, for this specific ask, we just want to look at those, like, 4 or 5 funnel stages and see if we’re, like, directionally correct.
48 00:06:53.760 ⇒ 00:07:02.139 Parliament Conference Room: And for anything that we are not close on, so for example, I know, Robert, you mentioned a subscription success is probably going to be off.
49 00:07:02.320 ⇒ 00:07:12.259 Parliament Conference Room: we want to understand, like, what the recommendations are, so we can quickly resolve that. So that’s all we’re trying to do, so, like, a directional yes-no for each funnel stage.
50 00:07:12.410 ⇒ 00:07:14.180 Parliament Conference Room: I’m sure there will be a lot of
51 00:07:14.340 ⇒ 00:07:18.559 Parliament Conference Room: Side quests that will go from there, but at this point, that’s all we’re interested in right now.
52 00:07:19.600 ⇒ 00:07:34.459 Robert Tseng: Okay, yeah, I think we’re special. Yeah, I mean, we looked… we looked through all the objects yesterday, so we kind of know where we would pull from, so, yeah, I guess, yeah, this should… this should be, I mean, we’re… we’re still going to get you the answer by this… this week, I mean, ideally today, but…
53 00:07:34.930 ⇒ 00:07:51.619 Parliament Conference Room: Yeah, no worries, and, yeah, please use Mark, I mean, not to volunteer you, but, like, use Mark as a resource, if there’s any questions, like, we’re… before we have to navigate, you know, building connectors and whatnot, like, it’s easier for everyone if we can try and do everything within the tool, and then understand that, you know, in the future we may need to
54 00:07:52.150 ⇒ 00:07:55.870 Parliament Conference Room: Add additional tools, but we can cross that bridge when we get there.
55 00:07:56.190 ⇒ 00:07:57.200 Uttam Kumaran: Sure.
56 00:07:57.200 ⇒ 00:08:14.700 Parliament Conference Room: Yeah, feel free to send me anything or any questions, or if you have, like, specific things you’re trying to query, I can try to help, like, how I formulate the query, too. I am also on PTO most of next week, which is, I think we’re filling out. If, like, Monday or Tuesday, you still need help, I can tag somebody in that can help as well.
57 00:08:14.700 ⇒ 00:08:28.259 Uttam Kumaran: Cool, yeah, I’ll be making… I’ll be in it all day today, so I’ll… I’ll send you if I get stuck anywhere. And then, yeah, I think… again, we’re just… we just have a couple of objects that we’re running queries over, so it’s mainly the projects, plans, and users, so…
58 00:08:29.420 ⇒ 00:08:30.940 Parliament Conference Room: Okay, awesome.
59 00:08:31.140 ⇒ 00:08:35.139 Parliament Conference Room: Robert, was there anything else we needed to discuss at this time?
60 00:08:35.929 ⇒ 00:08:39.309 Robert Tseng: No. I mean, I know this is the… this is the hot topic, so, like, I…
61 00:08:39.309 ⇒ 00:08:40.469 Parliament Conference Room: Yeah.
62 00:08:40.470 ⇒ 00:08:40.989 Robert Tseng: I’m not gonna…
63 00:08:40.990 ⇒ 00:08:50.039 Uttam Kumaran: No, I’m the main blocker, because yesterday I was like, well, let me see if I can get this done a little bit easier, and so I was like, well, I’ll ask Park tomorrow, but yeah.
64 00:08:50.220 ⇒ 00:09:04.679 Uttam Kumaran: That makes sense, like, that’s totally fine. Yeah, yeah, it’s no problem. And then, yeah, so Robert, I’ll… I’ll run some stuff, and then I’ll let you know today, and then maybe at least we can get Alicia, like, a loom, or if we want to hop on later today or tomorrow, we should do that for sure this week.
65 00:09:05.360 ⇒ 00:09:05.960 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
66 00:09:06.820 ⇒ 00:09:11.180 Parliament Conference Room: Okay, thank you so much. I appreciate you working within the confines of README.
67 00:09:11.180 ⇒ 00:09:28.389 Uttam Kumaran: Of course, of course. No, no, no, I mean, it’s, it’s… every client is different, and like, again, for us, it’s like, we’re always used to just working with whatever we can get, so I’m happy to run and then kind of show the value, and there’s a lot of ways to kind of do this, still stay, like, really security compliant longer term, so we can totally…
68 00:09:28.390 ⇒ 00:09:29.050 Parliament Conference Room: So, yeah.
69 00:09:29.050 ⇒ 00:09:29.760 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
70 00:09:30.270 ⇒ 00:09:43.670 Robert Tseng: Well, while we have Mark here, I mean, I’d love to ask a few questions that just, like, read me data history, I guess. So, like, yeah, we know that, you know, September feature… feature launch, if something… something goes down for a while,
71 00:09:43.670 ⇒ 00:09:57.330 Robert Tseng: I guess, like, how do you handle a situation like that when we’re… when you’re just… when it’s just, like, the production DB, right? I guess, like, there’s a… there’s a… there’s a leakage in amplitude, it didn’t get backfilled because amplitude doesn’t really have… have that set up, so, I guess, like.
72 00:09:57.330 ⇒ 00:10:06.240 Robert Tseng: I mean, you obviously have backups and stuff that we see here in Mongo, but is that… is that, like, the only place where we’re able to…
73 00:10:06.250 ⇒ 00:10:07.070 Robert Tseng: Kind of…
74 00:10:07.210 ⇒ 00:10:14.380 Robert Tseng: I mean, all data persists from there, right? So, like, I’m just curious, like, kind of, when a situation like that happens, like, how does your team handle it?
75 00:10:15.150 ⇒ 00:10:24.269 Parliament Conference Room: he’s specifically referring to, the launch button was not working correctly for 3 weeks in September, and so we saw, like, a dip. Yep. Okay,
76 00:10:25.630 ⇒ 00:10:37.010 Parliament Conference Room: Yeah, I’m not sure I follow your question still, though. Like, we, I mean, Mongo’s the source of our… all of our data. We do back it up every day, we have, like, rolling backups as well.
77 00:10:37.300 ⇒ 00:10:50.089 Parliament Conference Room: And then for, like, yeah, obviously stuff like that launch button not showing up, like, that was unfortunate, we fixed the decision as we knew about it. But, like, yeah, it did mean that there was a few weeks there where that was, like, problematic for our users. I’m not sure if, like, that answers your question, but…
78 00:10:50.090 ⇒ 00:10:54.769 Robert Tseng: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, you have other BI tools too, so, I mean…
79 00:10:54.830 ⇒ 00:11:05.089 Robert Tseng: I guess, like, Amplitude didn’t get patched, obviously, because, I don’t know, maybe you’re just… it’s just streaming in, and there’s… you’re not, like, regularly updating it with, with data from…
80 00:11:05.090 ⇒ 00:11:18.729 Robert Tseng: like, you know, there’s no, like, server data that’s going into the amplitude to… to kind of, like, stitch anything that gets… that gets broken. But maybe on, like, other BI platforms, you have something like that set up. I was just kind of poking around to see.
81 00:11:18.920 ⇒ 00:11:19.650 Robert Tseng: Like, what happened?
82 00:11:19.650 ⇒ 00:11:32.459 Parliament Conference Room: I mean, I could be out of date here, too, but, like, I don’t think we really use BI tools too heavily. Amplitude’s probably the closest thing we have there. And even Amplitude, it’s, like, a more recent thing for us, like, funneling a lot of this data there, and I don’t know how…
83 00:11:32.460 ⇒ 00:11:45.699 Parliament Conference Room: much is actually being looked at by anybody internally yet, because we haven’t got to that point where it’s, like, fully rolled out, I don’t think. This is also not my area, so, like, I’m… Were you, under the impression that we had other tools? Which ones were mentioned to you?
84 00:11:45.700 ⇒ 00:11:50.750 Robert Tseng: Wait, did… didn’t someone say… talk about Looker, or… was that… No.
85 00:11:50.750 ⇒ 00:11:59.969 Parliament Conference Room: Not Rainme. Not that I know of, yeah. I mean, we sync up to Salesforce for, like, our sales team, but that’s more on the enterprise side, and not, like, necessarily… This is our own enterprise.
86 00:12:00.180 ⇒ 00:12:06.040 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, it’s all coming through. Are folks running any other, like, reporting queries? Sorry, go ahead, Robert. Yeah, Swing.
87 00:12:06.040 ⇒ 00:12:09.449 Robert Tseng: No, no, no, I mean, I know they have Google Sheets as well, because, obviously.
88 00:12:09.450 ⇒ 00:12:13.460 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, I guess I was just wondering, like, where… where analytics queries, if, like, folks are…
89 00:12:13.580 ⇒ 00:12:18.309 Uttam Kumaran: folks are running analytics queries, are they running it similarly, like, directly on Mongo, like, for…
90 00:12:18.310 ⇒ 00:12:19.500 Parliament Conference Room: Nice.
91 00:12:19.500 ⇒ 00:12:20.100 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah.
92 00:12:20.100 ⇒ 00:12:21.800 Parliament Conference Room: Which meditates?
93 00:12:21.800 ⇒ 00:12:23.749 Robert Tseng: The database, right, that’s what it was. Okay.
94 00:12:23.750 ⇒ 00:12:32.619 Parliament Conference Room: I actually just now found out that we use that. It’s not… so it’s not used consistently across the company. There are some people who, like, I have one metabase
95 00:12:32.710 ⇒ 00:12:49.380 Parliament Conference Room: dashboard that someone spun up for me for a very specific stage of the funnel, but there’s no, like, company-wide adoption, so I’d have to pull in that engineer if you have specific questions. Okay. And then for, for, like, a general, like, product data kind of stuff,
96 00:12:49.550 ⇒ 00:12:53.009 Parliament Conference Room: I typically just pull that myself, directly from Mongo.
97 00:12:53.010 ⇒ 00:12:53.370 Robert Tseng: Cool.
98 00:12:53.370 ⇒ 00:12:56.419 Parliament Conference Room: Or write a script to do so, and stuff like that.
99 00:12:56.770 ⇒ 00:13:06.120 Parliament Conference Room: is, like, usually the product data, like, it’s usually me that has the questions, or it’s, like, usually a migration thing, so I’m just able to do it myself, so we haven’t really, like, scaled it out in any kind of meaningful way.
100 00:13:06.440 ⇒ 00:13:24.380 Uttam Kumaran: Cool, yeah, that usually is the case, like, there’s usually a BI tool, and there’s usually Amplitude or MixedPanel for product analytics, so not surprising. I was just like, yeah, at some point, there’s probably some use for, like, a dashboard just to measure users and things like that, so I’m sure that’s… some of that is happening in Metaplane. And I assume Meta… Metaplane, Mark, you know, is that connected directly to Mongo?
101 00:13:24.750 ⇒ 00:13:25.240 Uttam Kumaran: I agree.
102 00:13:25.240 ⇒ 00:13:29.090 Parliament Conference Room: Yeah, I just found out how to use that.
103 00:13:29.090 ⇒ 00:13:31.119 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, okay, alright.
104 00:13:31.470 ⇒ 00:13:38.629 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, maybe, Lisa, sometime in the next few weeks, I can chat with… just with that, the person who… who owns Metaplane, just ask, like,
105 00:13:38.630 ⇒ 00:13:41.959 Robert Tseng: It’s Metabase, Metabase. Oh, Metabase, Metabase, yeah, just, what…
106 00:13:41.960 ⇒ 00:13:44.449 Uttam Kumaran: What their, how their setup works.
107 00:13:44.490 ⇒ 00:13:48.889 Parliament Conference Room: Yeah, happy to. Feel free to send over the questions, or I’ll add them to the channel.
108 00:13:48.890 ⇒ 00:13:56.220 Uttam Kumaran: Yeah, because, that person probably already did some aggregations on top of this data, and it’s, like, sort of may have some business logic that we can take advantage of, so…
109 00:13:56.510 ⇒ 00:13:58.359 Parliament Conference Room: Cool. That makes sense.
110 00:13:58.620 ⇒ 00:13:59.130 Uttam Kumaran: Buh.
111 00:13:59.360 ⇒ 00:14:00.820 Uttam Kumaran: Okay, yeah, that’s all I have.
112 00:14:01.280 ⇒ 00:14:02.470 Robert Tseng: Okay. Okay.
113 00:14:02.470 ⇒ 00:14:04.469 Parliament Conference Room: Awesome. Thanks, guys!
114 00:14:04.780 ⇒ 00:14:05.109 Uttam Kumaran: Thank you.
115 00:14:05.110 ⇒ 00:14:06.420 Parliament Conference Room: Thanks, Dr. Bye. Bye.