Brain Decisions
2026-07-17
D008: Analytics: fully custom pipeline
Context: Saif wants an in-site analytics product (like PostHog/CleverTap) showing real visitor behavior, explicitly to showcase skill.
Options considered:
- Capture with PostHog, build only the dashboard, fastest, reliable, but capture isn't "yours".
- Fully custom, own tracker + ingest + store + dashboard.
Decision: Fully custom, end-to-end (chosen by Saif). Implementation: Custom Analytics.
Why: It's the strongest possible engineering proof under D001 - Site as Proof Principle, the whole pipeline is demonstrably his. Designed to stay lightweight (~3KB tracker, lazy) and privacy-clean (cookieless, IP discarded).
Trade-offs: biggest single build chunk (its own Roadmap phase) and adds a datastore (Neon Postgres + Upstash Redis). Honest scaling note for interviews: a columnar store (ClickHouse/Tinybird) at real scale, knowing when to scale is itself the signal. Visibility open (Open Questions #5).