3.5+ years in the making: Live Analytics without AI

#showdev #webdev #analytics

Just wanted to share my journey after 3.5 years of building a live web analytics tool from scratch, and without AI: WireBoard.io

As a web publisher for the last 15 years, I used UA (before GA4) and then Chartbeat. I always loved real-time. At the beginning of the internet I spent my time on IRC, which was great and a huge change from newsgroups and forums.

A few years later, Chartbeat was changing its customer base and focusing on big news publishers, and my workflow was about to change with it. I loved being able to watch my traffic live and spot anything unusual, day by day, compared to the same day the previous week.

So I decided to replace it with my own product, but with the things their tool was missing. I spent about 8 months thinking it through and sketching different architectures to handle the load and the logic of the data processing pipeline. Then I learned to code in Go (which was surprisingly easy) and built an MVP.
After some iterations, I worked on the frontend (Laravel + React) and kept improving the product based on user feedback.

The features I couldn't find anywhere else:

Truly real-time data via streaming instead of polling.
Merging data from different websites into one chart, so I can see at a glance whether traffic is unusual "today" compared to last week.
A flexible dashboard, arranged like widgets on a phone.

I mostly worked on this quietly and didn't talk about it much on social media or anywhere else, since I'm a dev and not a marketer. This is my biggest project, and I've enjoyed the long journey.

All of this happened before the AI era, which turned out to be good timing: I can work on the codebase knowing exactly what does what and where. Over the last 6 months I've experimented with using Claude on some parts of the project (only the frontend), but in limited areas: