Counterscale's still humming along – almost 2k GitHub stars now. This summer we (mostly @stordahl.dev) added: - user auth - referrer favicons - works w/ multiple CF accounts - UTM tracking (PR lands soon)

I have some pretty exciting news to finally share here - in July, I joined @benv.ca as a maintainer on Counterscale, the open source analytics service that you deploy to your Cloudflare account! We just released v3.2.0-beta.0 which includes a long awaited feature - auth for your dashboard!

I like how you can be miles away and it still pops

Less than 2 weeks! lu.ma/7revpsif

The amount of learning I've had to do to become effective working/coding with LLMs is staggering. Everyday employees aren't gonna figure this out in their spare time. You've got to intentionally carve out time for them to level up – or your team is gonna be left behind.

Playing around w/ Midjourney to animate some pixel art scenes

📈 React package downloads/day are up almost 70% (!) since the start of 2025

I think I found the least maintained feature on @github.com

🆕 new Counterscale landing page I first mocked this up in Figma. Then exported a PNG and gave it to Claude Code. That gave me a good start, but I spent hours tweaking afterwards in Claude + Cursor.

Counterscale v3.1.0 is out: 🆕 now pick which Cloudflare org to deploy to if your user belongs to multiple orgs (thanks @sergical on GitHub) 🆕 now uses Wrangler v4

doesn't matter how much time I spent here visiting still feels magical

I'm spending a few weeks in Vienna this summer after going hard w/ German on Duolingo + random German YouTube content for ~6+ months. Will report back ...

I don't even remember how my website is being served anymore, I push changes via Git and somehow it's updated 😅

IMO blogs aren't dead yet – with so many having switched to video, I think writing is due for a comeback

As a software developer, I've been thinking a lot right now about AI, change, and anxiety ... and wrote a blog post about it. It's also about my time working at a bookstore in the mid-2000s, and has a lot of programming book nostalgia. Hope it's mildly interesting. benv.ca/blog/posts/t...

Not a lot of cities where you can fit horses, streetcars, bicycles, pedestrians, and cars into one shot.

IMO the "killer app" of 4K monitors is being able to take screenshots that aren't blurry. I have a nice Ultrawide that's 1440p and totally usable for everything *but* this and it's irritating.

Last year I decided to stop website analytics on @projectwallace.com mostly because of the $14/month price tag. Recently Counterscale by @benv.ca came on my radar and for a free product this is 💯

After a lot of testing + production validation, Counterscale v3.0.0 is out: In this version: * New CLI installer makes deploying/updating easy * More accurate visitor + bounce statistics * Back to being a single Cloudflare Worker again More notes and instructions here: github.com/benvinegar/c...

A clear indicator that quality of life has decreased under this President.

I've been trying to level up the Counterscale landing page in Figma. Thoughts? Does any of this messaging hit for you? (thanks @jeremymorrell.dev for providing a quote!)

I miss when the biggest news of the day was a guy getting his monkey jpeg stolen

Yesterday I wrote a detailed breakdown of an issue on GitHub, and wrote about 4 potential solutions and their pros/cons to see what people thought. First time I've seen someone ignore all that and just copy/paste it all into ChatGPT to get an answer.

Today is the day! After a decade of working on Sentry it's time for me to move on to new adventures. It's been a wild ride, and I'm taking a lot with me from this experience. lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/3/31/le...

Discovered a useful AI coding use case: You can use Claude 3.7 to approximately "de-obfuscate" minified code. Useful for reverse-engineering scripts. Here's trying it out on Sentry's minified SDK (which is open source). I've gotten similar-looking results on source code w/o accompanying OSS too.

🇨🇦 Last year this post connected me to ~20 Canadian founders & software devs. I'm told those conversations were helpful; for one company, it led to raising a major funding round. It feels important to do it again. 👋 If you're here and building software tools and/or OSS products, I'd like to help.

When I applied for my first TN, my application was wrong. But the US customs agent let me enter as a tourist so I could fix it + reapply the same day. If there was a chance I'd be disappeared to a private prison instead, I'd have never applied at all. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

My new favourite Ottawa museum is the Diefenbunker. It's like visiting a real-life Fallout vault.

Next up: trying to let users upload a pic and it'll turn it into a classy black & white newspaper-style portrait using stable-diffusion-v1-5-img2img on @cloudflare-dev.bsky.social It's not going well

I added a theme picker with some pleasant-looking themes.

I think it was a mistake to kick Trump off social media in 2021, because everyone forgot how completely exhausting it is hearing from him every single day.

I'm a fan of Rick Rubin's aesthetic quotes ... so much so I vibe coded my own tool to make them. Except I realized I'm not actually that smart or profound. So I added some magic buttons to help me.

🇨🇦 Thinking back to how the Ontario govt in the 80's invested massively in computer education – putting these bespoke ICON machines + custom educational software in every school. We had ~20 of these in my school + used them an hour every week. Directly led to my career in computing.

vibecode

I was meh on standards efforts like @opentelemetry.io in the past, but this escalating trade war has radicalized me. I think API/SDK portability in developer SaaS products is going to be a bigger deal moving forward. @cdrux.bsky.social has a take on this here: blog.devcycle.com/open-standar...

The @vlt.sh team launched "reproduce" today, an #OSS tool that verifies if npm packages match their source code. With recent supply chain attacks exposing provenance limitations, this approach is already showing better adoption rates than traditional methods. ➳ socket.dev/blog/vlt-lau... #JavaScript

🇨🇦 Today’s election day in Ontario. If you care about reducing government waste, you should know the incumbent PC party spent $600 million - your money - just to bring alcohol purchases to corner stores … one year earlier than planned. That’s a lot of Microsoft Teams licenses.

I agree marketing is more important than ever, but the most successful dev tools shops will have fused engineering, product, and marketing

The @syntax.fm effect: Counterscale was *briefly* mentioned near the end of yesterday’s 60 minute episode (#879 Fullstack Cloudflare). So far has led to a couple hundred new visitors and counting, most of which came via search.

Finally happy to launch Moleskin, your personal web journal. I've been dog-fooding it for a few months and it's really nice to journal wherever I am. Clone the project, setup KV and environment variables, and deploy it to your own Cloudflare account. Give it a shot! github.com/stordahl/mol...

Installing this the first time around was so easy, I had it all done in under 15 minutes. And yet Ben—unsatisfied—made it even easier. I've upgraded to 3.0 of Counterscale. Too easy.

v3.0.0 beta of Counterscale is up. In this version: 🆕 CLI install wizard (using clack 🙏 @natemoo.re) 🆕 Deploys as a single Worker again / no more CF Pages 🆕 Uses pnpm for development 👇Video: self-deploy your own web analytics stack in 35s github.com/benvinegar/c...

I like this little tidbit from Sid Meier’s memoir

I like shoveling snow. It's a small hardship that makes people here just a little bit tougher.

Codegen tip: If you're capturing code coverage on your projects, AI code assistants (Cursor, Windsurf/Cascade, etc) will look at the coverage output and suggest new test code to fill in the gaps.

@wesbos.com 👋

I'm putting together a small group that's considering building a Buy-Canadian index website. We're looking for 1-2 designers and UX experts to help. Msg me to discuss if you're interested 🍁

I want to make this look way cooler – any suggestions?

Imagine deploying your own web analytics stack in < 60 secs