Who this is for
This is the part most interesting to platform-minded readers who want to see how edge placement, caching, and a small amount of state can work together on a personal site.
Projects / Runtime path
Edge Visitor Pipeline
A small edge pipeline built for freshness, privacy, and graceful failure.
The visitor pipeline exists to support the globe, but it is its own project too: a constrained data path for collecting just enough information to power a live visual without drifting into surveillance habits. The pipeline now uses Pages Functions plus a Durable Object to accept, dedupe, throttle, and serve rolling snapshots with clear retention limits and useful debugging signals.
What needed solving
The globe needed fresh coordinates and short-lived history, but a traditional analytics pipeline would have been too heavy, too slow to iterate, and too invasive for the actual goal.
What changed after shipping
The pipeline now uses Pages Functions plus a Durable Object to accept, dedupe, throttle, and serve rolling snapshots with clear retention limits and useful debugging signals.
Placement decisions
This work only makes sense when the data path stays close to the request. Pages Functions handle collection, and the Durable Object keeps the rolling state coherent without adding a full database.
Restraint as architecture
The retention window, coarse geolocation, and limited schema are not omissions. They are part of the design. The system is intentionally narrow because the experience does not need more.
Operations reality
The most useful recent improvements were not glamorous. Better beacon retry behavior, clearer status reporting, and more predictable refresh logic made the feature feel reliable across browsers instead of only on the main machine.
The rules that kept this project honest.
- Collect less data than a normal analytics product would.
- Prefer freshness and resilience over exhaustiveness.
- Keep the backend debuggable enough that visual issues can be traced quickly.
Concrete wins from the current version.
- Keeps the globe feeling current without forcing the whole site into a heavier backend shape.
- Makes rate limiting and privacy boundaries explicit in the code and UI.
- Stays simple enough to maintain as a solo project.
Stack and routes
The technical spine behind the project.
Pages FunctionsDurable ObjectApproximate geolocationEdge cache
Written trail
Open the archive Posts that explain the reasoning around this project.
Edge is a placement decision, not a belief system
The edge is excellent at some jobs, distracting for others, and most useful when treated as a placement choice instead of a product religion.
The smallest observability stack that still helps on a personal app
Small projects do not need enterprise telemetry theatre, but they do need enough signals to answer the next useful question quickly.
Latency is a trust signal, not a performance afterthought
Fast interfaces shape user confidence before anyone notices architecture, reliability charts, or clever implementation details.
More projects
See the full index The rest of the site system is connected work, not filler.
Visitor Globe
A 3D globe that turns recent visits into ambient presence instead of analytics theater.
Open case studyJason Eran Site System
The broader personal site system: static-first, searchable, and public-safe by design.
Open case studyReader Loop
Search, resume reading, and sharing tools that help a quiet site stay usable.
Open case study