marvinblum

I'm rewriting the open-source core [0] of our product [1] to add more flexible reports.

This is the first time I'm building with the help of AI (Claude), but I don't really let it write code. It has been really helpful in discussing ideas (I'm mostly working alone), like a rubber duck that actually talks back. The code it generates however has many subtle and sometimes obvious mistakes in them, so I decided to write the code myself.

The main benefits over the previous version will be:

- Dynamic reports (ClickHouse queries are generated on the fly)

- Better performance

- Much cleaner and less code

- Better and faster data ingestion including new features, like full support for JSON metadata

- And much more

It feels kinda crazy that I've been working on this project for more than 5 years now and it's still exciting :)

[0] https://github.com/pirsch-analytics/pirsch (v7 is the new branch)

[1] https://pirsch.io/

Exactly what I thought. Work sheets used to look like this if they have been copies of copies of copies...

Of course not, otherwise the rich wouldn't get richer and that would be bad for power consolidation. Everything is moving into this direction, so why should it be different with AI?

We had this discussions for years with factory machines, and nothing came out of it. Don't get me wrong, I hate having taxes for everything (living in Germany with ~65% total tax strain for me if you include everything), but this is about power and stealing other peoples work.

I've decided to take a break from working on Pirsch Analytics (pirsch.io) until next year and focus on some side projects instead:

1. Shifu (https://github.com/emvi/shifu) - a code-based CMS with admin UI. It's really easy to set up, written in Go, free and open-source, and I already sold a few websites using it. It can be used as kind of a framework to build more specialized features into a website and takes away the maintenance hell from managing a WordPress installation or a similiar CMS with tons of plugins that break with every update.

2. Zenko (working title, repo is private for now) - a very simple and no-bullshit project management software. It will be free and open-source, but I might offer a hosted option for a few bucks (like $20/year for all users of a team). I mainly build this for ourself to replace Linear, because we don't really make use of it. Don't get me wrong, Linear is awesome, but we basically only need an advanced Todo list. Main goals:

* Pull updates on the dashboard by yourself, instead of receiving notifications all the time via email

* Keep it simple stupid - no unnecessary features, no AI, just the bare minimum

* Cheap (for the hosted version, free if self-hosted) and easy to host (again written in Go)

* No feature-creep

3. Last but not least, I'm working on a "game engine" written in Go and SDL2. I do this for fun, but it is coming along nicely and teached me a few new concepts already (like ECS in Go).

On the plus side, this has prompted many people to finally switch to Linux. Even people I would never have thought would consider it are now thinking about it, or have already moved over. Companies are also recognising the issues with Microsoft.

I'd say cats are already pretty much self-driven.

Thank you for making ProtonDB! I use it a ton <3

Yup, I've been running Altcha on pirsch.io for a while now, and it was super easy to set up, is free, and open-source.

One of the main reasons we've switched from hCaptcha is privacy. The server-side stuff can be self-hosted and there is a Golang integration. Really nice.

Here is the link for anyone who would like to take a look: https://altcha.org/

It's not that hard, but there are a few pitfalls you can stumble into. I currently run three clusters for myself and have set some for clients in the past.

Some of the default config options are weird and SSL is something that needs to be addressed. Overall, still one of the easier DBs to maintain.

I keep recommending it, but you can check out https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv... for a more complete list of EU based web analytic services.

I'm one of the co-founders of Pirsch, and a bit worried because the space is getting really crowded :D

I'm still working like crazy on our privacy-friendly web analytics tool Pirsch Analytics (pirsch.io) :) I've been doing this for more than 4 years now and I'm still super motivated, especially because it's challenging from a technical point of view and very rewarding (I live from it now).

There is still a lot to do and learn (especially in the marketing department), but we have plans for a new product in the privacy space. I don't want to say too much about it until we've started working on it, but it's in the compliance space and fits quite well with our existing product. I think it's always a good starting point to solve your own problems.

It's the same for me. I've switched to DuckDuckGo about 2 or 3 years ago and it feels like Google used to. I'm always shocked to see how bad the results are and how cluttered the top section is on Google if I happen to search there on someone else's computer.

LLMs have mostly been useful for three things: single line code completion (in GoLand), quickly translating JSON, and generating/optimizing marketing texts.

We had someone with a lot of experience in this field working for very large German corporations and got a discount/startup bonus. I wouldn't call it cheap.

Imagine starting a business in Germany. How are you suppose to pay 30-50k for legal questions before selling anything?

Funny enough, they seem to have "copied" our structure. I remember when it basically was just a slider, without tiers.

I guess you have to sign up to a few, test them on your site, and decide which one to use. In the end, they are all slightly different.

If you would like to self-host or have other specific requirements, you can quickly reduce the list to a couple of options of course.

This also factors in, yes. If we would store it indefinitely, there is the risk of profiling (estimating who someone is by their behaviour).

No, they are comparable, but it's an independent tool. When we started, Plausible wasn't as big as it now is. We also had a focus on deeper integrations via API from the get go, a nicer dashboard, and a few other minor details.

I basically started this for my personal use as a library for Go, which it still is:

https://marvinblum.de/blog/server-side-tracking-without-cook...

No. You can learn more about it here:

https://docs.pirsch.io/privacy

For Pirsch, we have a PWA you can install right from your mobile browser :)

Yeah, we also use the delta. However, you can send a custom event on close to update the session duration. The session won't be counted as bounced in our system then and the time is updated.

https://docs.pirsch.io/advanced/events

Correct, it's not so much about Cookies, but how data is collected and what is stored.

We have done a privacy risk analysis with an external lawyer and data protection officer, and concluded that Pirsch is in line with GDPR as we do not collect nor store personal identifiable information (PII). Processing stuff like IP addresses for example is legal as long as they are not stored and only cached for a reasonable amount of time (a few milliseconds in our case).

If you're interested, we have extensive documentation on this. You can reach out to support@pirsch.io to get it :)

If anyone is interested in doing something similar. This did cost us about 8,000 € in Germany.

You can find a nice list of privacy-respecting analytics tools on European Alternatives [0], including mine, Pirsch [1].

I've been in this space for ~3 1/2 years, so if you have any questions, please let me know :)

[0] https://european-alternatives.eu/category/web-analytics-serv...

[1] https://pirsch.io

Thumbs up for Nomad. We've been running it for about 3 years in prod now and it hasn't failed us a single time.

I think it's Minio.

We've been using Hetzner for years for Pirsch [0] now, and so far we had a great experience. I migrated all of our data from AWS S3 to their new object storage without issues. We only use it for user pictures and small files (white-labeling logos and such).

This is one of the rare cases where AWS is actually cheaper for us. It's probably more worth it if you have a lot of data. The only thing we're missing now is SES, and then we've fully migrated away from AWS :)

[0] https://pirsch.io

I'm working on our privacy-friendly and GDPR compliant web analytics tool Pirsch Analytics (pirsch.io) :)

I've been doing this for 3 1/2 years now and I'm still super motivated, especially because it's challenging from a technical point of view, and very rewarding (I live off it now). We just released a major update, making funnels more flexible and easy to use. One of our goals is to make analytics easy to understand also for non-marketeers.

We back up simple dumps to a Hetzner storage box (5€/month for 1 TB), which is fine for the moment. I download and restore the dumps locally regularly.

In the future, we will need a more robust and scalable solution of course.

I've been running Pirsch [0] on Hetzner Cloud for 3 1/2 years now on a self-hosted HashiCorp Nomad cluster. It has been super stable and very cost-effective. The Hetzner VMs are really cheap and a lot more capable at the same time. You can find everything on our blog article [1].

In front of it are two Caddy load balancers, also running on VMs (Hetzner offers load balancers, but we wanted to support custom domains [2]).

The databases are running on root servers though, to get the maximum out of them.

When we started, we used Google Cloud. I think we would be paying at least $2,500/month for the same setup, compared to ~$400 now. And I have happily managed this all by myself. I think a proper sysadmin for a larger corp is worth the cost!

[0] https://pirsch.io

[1] https://pirsch.io/blog/techstack/

[2] https://pirsch.io/blog/how-we-use-caddy-to-provide-custom-do...

I'm still working on our privacy-friendly web analytics tool Pirsch Analytics (pirsch.io) like a madman :) I've been doing this for 3 1/2 years now and I'm still super motivated, especially because it's challenging from a technical point of view, and very rewarding (I live off it now).

There is still a lot to do and learn (especially in the marketing department), but we have plans for a new product in the privacy space. I don't want to say too much about it until we've started working on it, but it's in the compliance space and fits quite well with our existing product. I think it's always a good starting point to solve your own problems.

Well, I mean, Google is planning that for all Chrome users:

https://github.com/GoogleChrome/ip-protection