
DataJoy is shutting down - yrochat
https://www.getdatajoy.com/
======
timthelion
Why don't companies feel comfortably "code dumping"? Just throw everything
online as a tarball, and say "we aren't supporting this and we don't want to
have anything to do wit h this, but here's the source."

~~~
jpallen
DataJoy Co-founder here. A lot of the DataJoy code IS available
([https://github.com/sharelatex/web-
sharelatex/tree/datajoy](https://github.com/sharelatex/web-
sharelatex/tree/datajoy)). Our other product ShareLaTeX has an open-source
version that you can run locally and is very similar to the version we host at
sharelatex.com. DataJoy naturally shares a lot of code with ShareLaTeX (if you
look at the two products, you'll see they're very similar). However, with
DataJoy, we never got the product to a stage where we felt it made sense to
invest time into 'good open source' (documentation, installation guides, etc),
but the 'code dump open source' version has always been there.

The main thing that isn't open source with DataJoy is our backend for running
code. At the moment this is so tied into Docker, S3, and how we deploy it in
our infrastructure, that I don't think it would be much use to anyone else.
The innovations here have been in how we deploy and provision it, not in the
code itself.

~~~
ianleeclark
I'm sorry to hear y'all are shutting down, I've been a big fan of Sharelatex
for going on two years now and have always used it to build my resumes.

~~~
Drdrdrq
I think they are only closing down Datajoy.

~~~
jpallen
Indeed, and one of the reasons is the success of ShareLaTeX means that it
takes our team's whole attention to keep up with the growth of ShareLaTeX, and
keep investing in feature development to keep up with demand. ShareLaTeX isn't
going anywhere.

~~~
infinite8s
So that sounds like success (even though it's sad for datajoy users)! You guys
tested the waters with 2 products, one has found product-market fit, and now
you guys are focusing on growing that one.

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belzebub
I wish I knew about this, I've been learning the python data analysis
ecosystem recently and this would be an excellent resource. Maybe visibility
is your issue.

~~~
williamstein
[https://cloud.sagemath.com](https://cloud.sagemath.com) is pretty similar in
functionality. (I work on SageMathCloud.)

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whatnotests
I never hear about these companies until their shutdown announcement.

Perhaps if they spent more time becoming visible and getting people's
attention, things would work out.

~~~
jpallen
In our defence, this post has had more than twice the attention of our Show HN
post! I think there's more drama in something like a shutdown and so it's more
'viral'. Getting people to take interest in a new product is much harder.

(Also, HN is not really a good target audience for us, so if you get news from
here, it makes sense you'd see this but not the product itself).

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nbmh
I'm curious what the founders / anyone else think went wrong? Especially
compared to ShareLaTeX

~~~
jpallen
The short answer is we didn't find product / market fit. It made some people
happy, and was useful to some people, but it didn't make people go out and
tell everyone they know to start using it. ShareLaTeX on the other hand was
growing organically and had people singing it's praises even when it would
sometimes randomly lose 30 minutes worth of your latest changes... (yes
really! That's very fixed now though don't worry). ShareLaTeX just filled a
much deeper need for people. There are so many other Python/R options out
there that we never filled a deep need with DataJoy.

The exception to that is in teaching. It did fill a big need there, but we
never managed to make the business model work (long high touch sales cycles,
but universities only willing to pay very low prices per class). We also never
found a growth model for this.

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zitterbewegung
If people are looking for a similar service I have used
[http://dataquest.io](http://dataquest.io) and I really have liked it.

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fauria
They have a wonderful example library
[https://www.getdatajoy.com/examples/](https://www.getdatajoy.com/examples/)
that would be too bad to lose if they eventually shut down their site.

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svoboda0
Anybody know of any similar alternatives to datajoy? That basically just has
an r or python environement online I've been using datajoy, a least a little
bit, basically everyday for the past 6 months and I'm sad to see it go.

~~~
williamstein
SageMathCloud ([https://cloud.sagemath.com](https://cloud.sagemath.com)) using
a Jupyter notebook with the R kernel, or a Sage worksheet in R mode.
(Disclaimer: I work on this.)

SageMathCloud is somewhat similar in functionality to DataJoy + ShareLaTeX,
ShareLaTeX is by the same people as DataJoy, and I think ShareLaTeX is not
shutting down anytime soon. I had always wondered why they built DataJoy as a
separate product, rather than just expanding the functionality of ShareLaTeX.
In the case of SageMathCloud, I built something more like DataJoy first, then
expanded the functionality to cover LaTeX typesetting, rather than making a
separate product. Also, SageMathCloud is 100% open source.

I recently posted
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12169979](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12169979)
here which was really about having several separate products using similar
technology but different names, versus having one big product.

~~~
williamstein
DataJoy is also similar to
[http://sagecell.sagemath.org/](http://sagecell.sagemath.org/), which requires
no sign in and lets you run Python (and much more) directly from a website, is
pretty battle tested at this point, and is entirely free to use and open
source. Disclaimer: I pay for some hosting of SageCell.

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verandaguy
Ah, that sucks!

This is the first time I've heard of this – had I known a few weeks or months
ago, I'd have jumped at the opportunity to learn how to use R.

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vegabook
Homejoy, Datajoy, killjoy?

Maybe the clue is in the name!

