Launch HN: Serra (YC S23) – Open-core, Python-based dbt alternative
Congrats on the launch!<p>Interesting project in a space that I am pretty certain is going to change a lot in the coming years. Here is a bit of random feedback and questions.<p>* Some of your messaging related to python vs yaml is a bit confusing, which results in me not being immediately clear on the value prop. After digging through docs and code I now understand that the yaml is a declarative pipeline calling the underlying python code that can include user defined transformations. Nifty! As someone who has led data platform teams, I understand that this would be a big win for any data platform team to better support data eng&#x2F;scientists. But you don&#x27;t tell me any of that. I would look at trying to give more context to what this is and adding more of these use cases and values in your marketing (even if they are pretty nascent at this stage)<p>* From the loom, the play you are doing is clear and makes a lot of sense to build a cloud service to easily run these jobs... but that makes me wonder if your licensing choice is maybe a bit too restrictive? IMHO, the most important thing to do when building dev tools is to be very deliberate in your end-to-end user -&gt; customer journey and designing your open source and commercial strategies to nicely dovetail. For a product like this, I would think the faster and bigger I can build a community, the better, and that may mean &quot;giving away&quot; a lot of the initial core innovation, but with a clear plan on the innovation I can drive through integrated services, which would imply as open as a license as possible. As is, I think you might find it much harder to get people to take it serious, as, unlike other source available companies (Elastic, Cockroach, etc) you aren&#x27;t yet proven to be worth the effort to get this approved vs a full open source alternative<p>* On a similar note, what is in the repo right now seems to be a relatively thin wrapper around spark. That isn&#x27;t a criticism. Many technologies and communities have started based on a &quot;remix&quot; of a lower level tool that offers simplified UX&#x2F;DX or big workflow improvements. What sets those apart though, imho, is to drastically lower the barrier to entry to using the underlying technology and to be seen as leaders and experts in the space you operate. I am guessing you probably have lots of features planned, but I would also give a soft suggestion to look as much into thinking of learnability as a feature (via features, interactive docs, etc) as I would almost anything else, as that is really where a lot of the value of a higher level interface like this comes in<p>* My past experience with really large and complex ETL jobs that essentially required dropping into spark to represent them has me wonder how much actual complexity can be represented by the transformers? I would be curious to know what your most complex pipeline is? It doesn&#x27;t seem there is an API limitation why these pipelines couldn&#x27;t get quite a bit larger and represent many sql statements, other than big long spark pipelines getting kind of ugly, and in some cases, could even remove the need for quite a few airflow jobs. I am curious to know if and how you see Serra addressing those sorts of problems like those types of ETL jobs.<p>Once again, congrats on launching! Happy to give more context&#x2F;thoughts in a thread or reach out to me via in profile