Data-Driven Decisions: Analytics Every Developer Should Track

For Your Projects

Core Web Vitals

Google uses these for ranking. Monitor them:

LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) — Should be < 2.5s
INP (Interaction to Next Paint) — Should be < 200ms
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) — Should be < 0.1

User Engagement

Bounce rate — Are people leaving immediately?
Session duration — How long do they stay?
Conversion funnel — Where do users drop off?

Error Tracking

// Simple error boundary with reporting
window.addEventListener('unhandledrejection', (event) => {
  trackError({
    type: 'unhandled_promise',
    message: event.reason?.message,
    stack: event.reason?.stack,
    url: window.location.href,
  });
});

For Your Career

GitHub Contribution Graph

Not about green squares — track:

Quality of contributions — PRs merged, issues resolved
Open source impact — Stars, forks, contributors
Consistency — Regular, meaningful commits

Learning Velocity

Track what you learn each month:

New technologies explored
Blog posts written
Side projects shipped
Courses completed

Tools I Use

Vercel Analytics — Web vitals + visitor insights
Sentry — Error tracking and performance monitoring
Plausible — Privacy-friendly analytics
WakaTime — Coding time tracking

The Meta-Lesson

What gets measured gets improved. Track the metrics that matter for your goals, not vanity metrics that feel good but teach nothing.