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My Unexpected Journey into Building a Real-Time Dashboard with JavaScript
3 min readJul 31, 2025
How a weekend experiment turned into a live-updating app with charts, sockets, and dynamic components
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1. Why I built it
One lazy Saturday, I thought:
“What if I could see my server logs, user counts, and queue lengths — all updating live on a single dashboard?”
I had never written a full real-time frontend, so this felt like the perfect playground.
Goal: Build a single-page web app with:
- Live charts
- A log feed
- Stats counters
2. Picking the stack
I chose:
- Node.js (Express) for the backend
- Socket.io for real-time data
- Chart.js for beautiful graphs
- Plain HTML/CSS + a bit of vanilla JS at first, then React later
All in pure JavaScript end to end.
3. Setting up the server
Using Express to serve static files + Socket.io for pushing updates.
// server.js
const express = require('express');
const http = require('http');
const socketIo = require('socket.io')…
