The data team at Stack Overflow works mainly in R and SQL for statistical analysis and modeling, and produces work that impacts every single visitor to the site. Communicating analytical results was frustrating, though; some documents were shared internally via a web-based office suite, some reports were manually emailed, and the team maintained an installation of Shiny Server Open Source for interactive apps. “We were spending too much time on the logistics of sharing our results,” says Julia Silge, data scientist at Stack Overflow. “The workflow we had was not consistent or efficient.”
Increasing the Impact of Data at Stack Overflow
Founded in 2008, Stack Overflow is the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. More than 50 million professional and aspiring programmers visit Stack Overflow each month to help solve coding problems, develop new skills, and find job opportunities. Stack Overflow partners with businesses to help them understand, hire, engage, and enable the world’s developers. Their products and services are focused on developer marketing, technical recruiting, market research, and enterprise knowledge sharing. Learn more about Stack Overflow’s business solutions here.
09/02/2018
The Solution
Stack Overflow turned to Posit Connect to solve these publishing and knowledge-sharing frustrations. The data team now publishes reports written in R Markdown and Shiny apps on Posit Connect in one convenient place. Some analyses that involve lengthy calculations are published as completed reports only, and analyses or dashboards that need to be updated regularly are published as executable, scheduled reports to be run every week or month.
The data team organizes regular sessions where developers and analysts across the company are invited to practice R, analysis, visualization, and modeling skills. Before adopting Posit Connect, the results of these sessions were often not tracked, but now they can be easily published with the push of a button so the knowledge is shared more broadly.
Why Posit?
A Posit professional product was a natural choice for the data team at Stack Overflow because such a product fits seamlessly in the existing R-centric workflows of the team and makes each individual more productive immediately. SREs are happy with the technical support from the team at Posit, and decision-makers who are consuming the analytics results, from executives to product managers to marketers, are happy that the data team is working and sharing results more efficiently.
The Payoff
The data team started by only publishing simple, completed reports, but the more complex features have proved to be significant force multipliers for the data team. Silge shares, “My favorite feature right now is the ability to schedule reports to execute every week or month, integrating data from multiple sources including our internal databases and a proprietary survey platform.” The data team at Stack Overflow is small, just a handful of people, and Posit Connect allows the work of these individuals to be more effective than it would be otherwise. The features of Posit Connect and ease of publishing increase the impact of data work throughout the organization.