I Built Analytics to Watch My Site, and Discovered It Was Watching Nothing
· 4 min read · by Michael Kaminski
Behind the Build, Vol. 4: wiring up real product analytics turned up a silent reverse proxy eating every POST request, a dropped entry pageview, and a Gantt chart bug where two bars collided despite their dates never touching.
Funny thing about analytics: you install them expecting to learn about your visitors, and instead you learn about your own code. This week I finally wired up real product analytics on this site — and every interesting discovery was a bug I'd introduced, not an insight about traffic.
The proxy that looked wired up and did nothing
The plan was simple: route analytics events through a same-origin /ingest path so ad
blockers wouldn't eat them. I tested it against a live preview before trusting it. GETs sailed through.
Every single POST came back with a 405 — the static hosting had no serverless runtime
behind that route, so it would have looked perfectly configured while quietly recording zero events
forever. That's the worst kind of bug: the dashboard would have shown "0 visitors," and I'd have believed
it. Ripped it out, events go direct now.
The pageview that vanished on arrival
Second bug was sneakier. The very first pageview of every visit — the one carrying the referrer, the whole reason you install analytics in the first place — was getting dropped. Turns out React fires a child component's effects before its parent's. My tracking component was capturing its pageview before the top-level app had finished initializing, and it tripped an "already initialized" guard meant to stop duplicate events. The fix was one line moved from a component to the entry file. The bug it fixed was invisible in every way except the metric that mattered most.
A Gantt chart that failed geometry
Smaller, weirder bug: I added a colored timeline rail next to my work history. Two roles whose dates never actually overlapped were rendering as colliding bars. The cause was a rule I'd added on purpose — a minimum bar length so a one-year role wouldn't render as an invisible sliver — and that floor pushed a short stint into a neighboring lane it had no business touching. Fixed by partitioning lanes on the rendered span instead of the raw dates, which is a sentence I never expected to write about my own résumé.
The lesson
Every one of these bugs would have shipped looking correct. A 405 on a route nobody calls by hand. An effect order nobody diagnoses without staring at DevTools. A floor value added for a good reason that broke a different invariant. Instrumentation doesn't just measure your product — it interrogates it, and this week it found three things about my own site that I didn't know were broken until I built something to watch them.