If you've ever used WakaTime, Wakapi, or any other coding time tracker, you know the experience. You install the extension, you forget about it, and at the end of the week you check your dashboard. There's a chart. Some numbers. Maybe a streak. Then you close the tab.
That's it.
You've just spent 30 hours coding this week and the tool that tracked it has nothing to say beyond raw numbers. No one else sees your effort. No one knows what you're working on. The dashboard isn't built to be shared, opened daily, or compared with anyone.
Now consider Strava.
What Strava actually built
Strava tracks runs and rides. At its core, it's an activity tracker, just like WakaTime. You install an app, it logs your activity, you get stats. Same primitive.
But Strava added five things on top of the data, and those five things are what made it Strava:
- A map: you see where everyone ran today, including yourself.
- Segments: specific stretches of road where runners compete against each other, with leaderboards.
- Athlete profiles: a public page that shows your activities, achievements, and progress.
- Clubs: groups where members can compare progress and motivate each other.
- Routes: a shared library of activities you can discover and bookmark.
None of these features improve your individual run. You can run perfectly fine without them. But together, they turn solo running into a shared experience. They give you a reason to come back tomorrow, not because the data is better, but because someone might see it.
That's what coding stats tools are missing.
What it would look like for code
Imagine the same five layers, applied to coding sessions instead of runs:
- A map, but of developers coding right now. You open the page and see hundreds of people across the world actively writing code, with markers lighting up as new sessions start.
- Segments, but for coding metrics. Weekly leaderboards on total coding hours, on TypeScript hours specifically, on commits per day. With friends, with your team, with everyone.
- A public dev profile, showing your activity over time, your top languages, your projects, your badges. A real portrait of how you actually code, not just what you ship to GitHub.
- Clubs, but for groups of developers. Your team, your bootcamp cohort, your indie hacker community.
- A directory of projects, where any developer can drop what they're shipping and get comments, upvotes, and discussion from the community.
Suddenly the dashboard isn't just for you. It becomes a space. A reason to come back. A way to find other people working on stuff you'd care about.
That's the layer that's been missing from coding stats since the beginning.
What we built
We spent the last two months building exactly this. The project is called DevGlobe.
The core is the same as any coding tracker. Lightweight extensions for VS Code, JetBrains, NeoVim, Zed, Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, and 20+ other editors. They send a heartbeat with language, file path relative to your repo root, branch, and editor identity. Never your source code. Never your prompts. Never your keystrokes.
On top of that, we built the five Strava layers:
A live 3D globe built with MapLibre GL JS, showing devs across the world coding in real time. Anonymous mode is the default, so the location shown is a random city in your country, not where you actually are.
Per-repo, per-file, per-branch, per-language stats with insights into your patterns (peak hours, language trends, where your week actually goes).
Private leaderboards you create with friends, teammates, or your bootcamp group. Goals, badges, weekly tiers.
Public dev profiles like this. Shareable like an athlete page on Strava.
A project directory where devs drop their open source projects, side projects, and startups, with comments and upvotes.
Plus a WakaTime-compatible endpoint, so if you're already using WakaTime, you can swap your client URL and your existing setup feeds into DevGlobe instantly.
Everything is free, open source under MIT. Your data is yours, code never leaves your machine, and privacy modes range from anonymous to fully off the globe.
What we learned
We launched the first version in March as just the globe. It got 170,000 Reddit views and 400 signups in two weeks.
And then most of them never came back.
The lesson was clear in hindsight: a cool toy is not a product. The globe was beautiful, but once you'd seen it spin, there was no reason to return. We had the visual hook without any of the depth that makes a tool sticky.
So we spent two months rebuilding the dashboards, the directory, the leaderboards, and the profiles. The globe is still there, still the entry point, but it's now the surface of something deeper. We went from "look at this cool thing" to "open this every morning to see your numbers, your friends, and what other devs are shipping."
Whether this works long term is still an open question. We're 8 weeks into the rebuild. Some users come back daily. Others don't. We're iterating.
But the thesis stands: coding stats need a social layer. Whether DevGlobe is the right implementation or not, the problem is real, and someone is going to build the Strava of coding sooner or later.
If you want to try ours, it's at https://devglobe.app. The source is on GitHub. Feedback welcome, especially if you've tried other coding stats tools and felt the same gap.
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