Prognostication For Fun And Profit: States And Events - Shopify

This post introduces the fundamental concepts of states and events, and their relationship to intervals and points, as a theoretical basis for calculating e-commerce metrics. It uses accounting as an analogy to explain the difference between balance sheets (counting states at a point in time) and income statements (counting events over a period). The post advocates for starting metric definitions with events due to their less abstract nature compared to states, and discusses how event-based counting offers greater flexibility for adapting to changing business definitions and for building predictive metrics.