Shortly after we started Motif last year, my co-founder Misha asked me to think about what core set of sequence operations we should support. Thus began our quest for a small, yet expressive set of operations that allowed our users to do almost anything they could imagine with their event sequence data. We’ve made a lot of progress since then, culminating in a carefully crafted domain-specific language we call SOL: Sequence Operations Language. I’m excited to share more about how we designed SOL — it will help you understand how Motif is attacking the problem of making it joyful and exciting to work with event sequence data we collect from our product instrumentation.
SOL is pronounced “Soul,” as in the title of this 1981 book by Tracy Kidder.
Before we begin, it’s worth clarifying what we mean by an event sequence. An event is a structured record of some specific thing that occurred, often created and recorded by a logging framework (e.g. a JSON object or Python dictionary). An event must have a timestamp associated with it, the moment it was observed or recorded. Events must also have a unique identifier, like the user associated with the event. Sorting events in order by timestamp, partitioned by these unique identifiers, we end up with a set of event sequences, each capturing everything that’s been observed about one particular user over time.
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