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.
