Author: 0xe400a85a6169bd8be439bb0dc9eac81f19f26843
Update Status: On Time
Project Health: 
On Track
Introduction
How we doin Decentraland Community? Howie Doin here with our monthly update on the Atlas Analytics grant project! As always, don’t forget to check out the new features at: https://data-dapp-dev.atlascorp.io. We’ve completed the open sourcing of the application, so be sure to check out the code at atlas-analytics-os · GitLab!
Highlights
This month we open sourced the UI application, or atlas-analytics-app in the repository. This application has quite a lot of code in it as it has evolved to suit several different community and client use cases over the past four years. In order to make it useful to others and protect our clients confidentiality, it took a bit to go through and remove any references explicitly to clients in comments and variable naming convention. We also had to make sure that since we’re open sourcing the code for everyone now, we’re not inadvertently open sourcing code that isn’t ours to open source because it was proprietary to a client. We also had to strip out the large amount of API keys, passwords, and internal URLs that the platform has historically depended on to not compromise the DAO funds used to host the infrastructure. Housekeeping, if you will.
You can check out the codebase at atlas-corporation / atlas-analytics-os / atlas-analytics-app · GitLab and deploy and run in the same way as the other microservices in the stack.
We also included the current versions of the analytics code for users to place into their scene for both SDK6 and SDK7. A fair bit of testing was done to ensure that all of the features and functionality are portable across both versions and that the backend (the database) and the front end (the recently open sourced app) can be version independent.
While we believe everything is up to par, we can always use feedback from the community to spot issues or recommend improvements, so please let us know if you have any feedback when using the application.
Special thanks to original Decentraland OG Carl Fravel, who put in significant time and effort into assisting us with the migration to SDK7. Just another data point to show the power of community coming together to contribute ideas and code enabling new functionality for other users!
Blockers
One surprising discovery was how much effort might be involved in migrating the Atlas Analytics code to an npm library. The way that Decentraland must compile and run the code, behavior of the module is different if it is placed in the /src/ folder or if it is brought in as part of an npm “node_modules” installation. A significant amount of rewriting would be required in order to support this feature in order to use the same data capture mechanisms used today - in both SDK6 and SDK7.
I’m putting this in the blockers section as it was something we had wanted to do, but this is not a critical feature of the platform. The benefit of moving the installation to an npm library was to be able to more easily uptake changes and updates to the platform. If we find ourselves planning on making a significant number of updates we may revisit this development, but most of the dramatic changes are likely behind us until a new version is required.
In summary, an ease-of-upgrade feature we wanted to build requires an unjustifiable amount of development work. If anyone reading this has pointers or shortcuts, we’d be happy to engage and learn more.
Next steps
The platform is now fully open sourced, with most major development activities completed and integrated, and the platform remains fully operational. All excess development fees not used will be used to extend the life of the platform beyond November 2024, when this grant is set to expire.
As mentioned in the last update, we now want to focus the last quarter on promotion and enablement content. To copy/paste the list of videos we want to include from last week as we haven’t received any volunteers and will be doubling down on our efforts in the coming month:
- Tutorial: What is analytics / why are they important? (e.g. brief introductory video about analytics in the metaverse)
- Tutorial: How to install analytics (npm module, setting up custom events, granting access to users via scene.json)
- Tutorial: How to use analytics (a walkthrough of all the different data and what it means / how to interpret it / why you’d care)
- Testimonial(s): Videos from some of our larger users on how Analytics have helped them
- Case studies: Some analytics projects that Atlas Corp was involved in which may appeal to brands looking to invest in the decentralized metaverse and how it’s easy to get analytics for the KPIs or launch integrity to make the investment successful. Some examples of this might include the notorious coindesk article, custom analytics we did for Fortune 500s, or anti-cheating capabilities and how they were conceived and implemented.
Again, if anyone in the community is interested in participating or being the subject of any of the above videos please let us know! Think of it as free promotion of whatever is you’re doing (help us help you!)
Interested scene owners or deployers can reach out to me howieDoin on discord - you guys know how to find me.