The idea
Instead of claiming activity on a CV, show it live. This dashboard aggregates public engineering signals — GitHub stars, followers and repositories, a contribution heatmap, language mix — alongside the site's own page-view counter, and refreshes itself without any manual updates.
How it works
It is a React Server Component that fans out to several sources in parallel and renders the result on the server:
- GitHub — the public REST API (
/users/{user}and/users/{user}/repos) for stars, followers, repositories and the language mix. - Contribution heatmap — a flat day-by-day calendar grouped into week columns and drawn as a pure-CSS grid.
- Site views — a
count(*)over the Postgresviewstable that also powers the footer counter. - Content & dataset — word counts and dataset size computed at build time.
Every fetch has a timeout and fails soft: if a source is unavailable, its section is simply hidden rather than crashing the page or showing fake zeros. Results are cached and revalidated hourly through Next.js ISR, so the page stays fast while staying fresh.
Trade-offs
- Live fetch vs. committed snapshot. Fetching at request time (with ISR) keeps the numbers current without a cron job committing data back to the repo.
- Graceful degradation over guarantees. Third-party APIs go down; hiding a section beats rendering a broken dashboard.