About Tamas Szuromi
Tamas Szuromi is the data and product growth lead at CodeSandbox; he owns the go-to-market strategy for their product. He has been solving complex business problems for over a decade and understands user needs and behavior. Before joining CodeSandbox in 2021, he worked at GitLab Inc. and Gameloft. He is also a mentor at GrowthMentor, where he helps startups with product-led growth.
Tamas talks about how online code editors like CodeSandbox can expedite data integration and processing. Within his team, he uses CodeSandbox’s products and data-driven decision-making to streamline the team’s data processing network. For example, he and his team discovered Airbyte while searching for a tool to support rapid prototyping, seamless testing, and productive feedback loops.
About CodeSandbox
CodeSandbox is on a mission to simplify coding and accelerate web development. We provide software builders with a way to collaborate, share, and get feedback on their ideas quickly and easily. Developers can jumpstart their projects and prototype ideas swiftly using the free sandboxes we provide. In addition, while working on a project, anyone on the product team can easily contribute to the final results. Thus, our product enables teams to not only build faster but together.
What was the problem?
Quickly finding a product-market fit
Users can create everything from educational content to app prototypes with our platform. So, our team needs a data-driven approach to assess product-market fit and learn more about newer product personas and use cases. For instance, to understand the seasonality of packages among front-end developers, we cannot use our existing data sources or analytics.
"We want to expand our use cases for CodeSandbox and improve our product-market fit in the upcoming six months. We're still an early-stage startup, and as such, speed is a priority for our team. We want to channel these new data sources as quickly and efficiently as possible. So it's all about speed, how we can integrate new data sources and make it happen as soon as possible."
Our old architecture wasn't flexible enough to support numerous users daily as it was outdated and inefficient. One of the significant problems it suffered was:
Complex and slow ETL tools
We had integrated Meltano, an on-prem solution, and Stitch, a SaaS ETL platform, into our architecture. However, Meltano's complicated user interface made it difficult to get started quickly. On the other hand, using Stitch to replicate a single large Postgres database instance was slow and difficult to manage.
"We initially tried Meltano, but the UI wasn't intuitive, and we didn't want to spend too much time setting up and navigating the system. On the other hand, Postgres integration with Stitch was slow, and we had to put a lot of effort into making it work."
How did we discover Airbyte?
Our online development platform became increasingly popular among developers, with thousands of daily active users and many data integrations. To streamline the data integration processes, we looked for a flexible solution that could seamlessly channel new data sources into our technical architecture. As a result of using Airbyte at the core of our new data architecture, my team was able to integrate various new data sources and enhance operational efficiency quickly.
How was the problem solved?
Faster, efficient, flexible data integration
Airbyte's APIs replaced critical data integrations. For example, we integrated Airbyte with Stripe, an essential product to support business continuity. Airbyte's intuitive interface and comprehensive documentation made setup and integrations quick and painless. Using Airbyte’s APIs, we have granular control over data syncing.
"Using Airbyte has been a great help with the Stripe integration — the UI is convenient to use, and we can set everything up more quickly. In addition, the documentation that Airbyte provides is awesome, and that makes it easy to figure stuff out."
How do we feel about using Airbyte?
We can quickly and easily introduce new data sources and channels into our technical architecture, increasing developer flexibility and agility. Our team has been able to gain more value from our data integrations thanks to Airbyte's open-source approach. What is going on under the hood and how the data integrations work became more transparent. With Airbyte's regular community announcements, everyone can keep up-to-date with the most recent data connectors and capabilities.
"There is ample support from the Airbyte community in terms of getting started and troubleshooting. I can search for a specific topic and immediately find relevant answers."
We rely on Airbyte to power data integrations, so our team is looking forward to contributing to Airbyte's connector ecosystem in the future.
"As we grow, we will need additional connectors than what Airbyte provides, and we will go ahead and build it. For example, we might need a connector for NPM, the JavaScript package manager, to analyze the seasonality of packages among developers. We will most likely write an Airbyte connector for that."
