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Comment by mtrpcic | Hacker News Reader

Since you created the graph, could you provide more context as to the units of measurement and scale for the axes? Are you using the derivative of growth as biot mentioned below, or something else? This graph shows two lines that stay static over time (meaning that either Niantic started off on day one with their entire server infrastructure already running with no plans to scale up, or they did not plan to scale up as demand grew), and one upwards trending line that shows actual changes in traffic over time. I'm trying to discern what this graph is supposed to represent, and if it's supposed to represent the expected traffic over time versus actual, it's showing that there was no expected growth in traffic.

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I cannot dive into too much more detail than is in the graph since it's still sensitive information. Y-axis is essentially traffic to Cloud Datastore (think: after layers of caching, etc), x-axis is date.

The 2 lines can be thought of as ceilings or upper bounds, hence why they are static - this are the numbers that traffic was expected to eventually reach at peak.So you can think of it as, "we thought we'd be looking at graphs that had this line as the top and traffic would be some curve underneath.

Obviously from the graph shown here, we/they needed a tall graph.

I think that my issue with the chart (and it's such a minor issue to quibble about) is that you're effectively treating your single dataset (actual traffic over time) the same way you're treating your annotations (expected and worst-case traffic). Both of these different things are represented the exact same way in your chart, which is a confusing way to structure things. I would alter the appearance of the ceilings/bounds to not be represented in the legend, and instead be on-chart annotations that show where those expectations were relative to the actual traffic. I would also recommend adding even the most rudimentary labels to the axes.

No arguments there. There's a balance that needs to be struck between technical detail and marketing appeal. Not everyone is going to agree on where that balance is, less so when you're trying to share sensitive information without giving too much away.

https://xkcd.com/833/

> The 2 lines can be thought of as ceilings or upper bounds, hence why they are static

I think this is the disconnect. This wasn't not obvious to me. It looked like everyone was expecting flat growth at either 1X or 5X. If there was a line showing what they thought would be the traffic that goes up (which would be expected) in addition to the ceiling lines then I think there would have been a lot less confusion.

I wonder if a single bar graph would have illustrated it better with overlaying colors for each ceiling.

> I cannot dive into too much more detail ... since it's still sensitive information.

Question: When should we start checking around for posts containing

A) High-level technical overviews with some basic implementational detail

B) In-depth analyses of the stack you built, the challenges you faced, what improvements you folded back into various open-source components, what you'd have done differently, etc etc

I'm thinking in terms of timescales - like n months or so. I suspect (A) will be a little easier (and quicker?) to publish than (B).

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