Stop user session tracking experiment

For the past months I've been running an experiment on abdullin.com:

• Removed Google Analytics from this website
• Replaced analytics with cookie-less user flow tracking: (Over) Designing privacy-first analytics.
• Used Clickhouse and Python to analyze http access logs from Caddy: Analyze website logs with clickhouse-local.
• IP addresses were not used.

Outcome: not worth it for me. The setup was clever, but the simplicity of "I don't track your session, even in anonymous and aggregated way" - wins.

I could produce charts like that:

or that:

But in reality a chart like that is good enough for me:

Update list for the website:

• Remove Hotwired Turbo and stop tracking user sessions. We are back to plain old server-side pages.
• Upgrade rendering pipeline to Python 3.9 (and a couple of other dependencies)
• Convert project repository to a proper Python project with setup.py, setup.cfg, pyproject.toml etc. This is consistent with Python standards and data science projects that I help to manage at day work. Less context switching is good.

Published: August 26, 2022.

🤗 Check out my newsletter! It is about building products with ChatGPT and LLMs: latest news, technical insights and my journey. Check out it out