Benchmark Radar Day 1: Building the Cumulative Dashboard MVP
Published:
Day one of Benchmark Radar. The project went from zero to a running cumulative dashboard in a single day.
Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01
The first day covered every layer of the system: CI/CD pipeline, data persistence, the Today dashboard MVP, attention signal processing, and arXiv RSS fallback. Twenty commits landed in a single push.
What shipped
Infrastructure. The GitHub Actions workflow was established with actions/checkout, upload/download-artifact, and setup-python bumped to their latest major versions. pytest was widened from <9 to <10 to keep pace with upstream.
Cumulative dashboard MVP. The core idea: persist daily snapshots outside the protected main branch so they accumulate over time. Each snapshot captures the full scored corpus, not just a summary.
Attention signal fixes. Duplicate signals were removed and detail rendering was corrected so the dashboard actually reflected what the pipeline collected.
arXiv RSS fallback. When the primary arXiv search endpoint fails, the system falls back to the RSS feed. This matters because arXiv search is rate-limited and unreliable at scale.
Today dashboard. The overview was compacted, cleaned up, and simplified. The goal was a page you could scan in thirty seconds.
Why it matters
The hardest part of building a radar is not collecting data; it is making yesterday’s data still mean something tomorrow. Persistence was the first commitment: every daily scan produces a record that future runs can compare against. Without that, the radar would forget everything overnight.
The arXiv fallback was also a foundational decision. Primary endpoints fail. RSS feeds are lower-fidelity but more resilient. Having both from day one meant the daily run would not break when arXiv rate-limited the crawler.
Issues addressed
- #4, #5, #1, #2, #3: dependency bumps
- #10: cumulative radar dashboard MVP
- #11: persist snapshots outside protected main
- #13: attention signal details and duplicates
- #14: compact Today overview
- #16: clean up Today dashboard UI
- #17: ignore local development artifacts
- #18: simplify Today dashboard
- #21: main snapshot source of truth
- #22: fall back to arXiv RSS
Tomorrow: cumulative trend maps, UI cleanup, and evidence source expansion.