The Scenario
You run developer relations for a programming language company. Every quarter, leadership asks the same question: where does the language rank globally among WakaTime users? Not anecdotally — with data.
WakaTime publishes aggregate statistics covering global coding hours by language across all active accounts. It is public. It is updated regularly. And it exists entirely outside any spreadsheet your team has.
The handoff to you came from a colleague who left three weeks ago. Their process was: go to the WakaTime stats page, read the numbers, type them into a slide. You need something less fragile for a quarterly trends report that goes to the board.
The bad version:
- You navigate to WakaTime's public stats page, read the language rankings off the page, and start typing into a Google Sheet: language name, hours, percentage — row by row.
- You get to row 18 and realize you have been recording approximate percentages because the page rounds to one decimal and you have been rounding differently.
- You finish 30 rows, save the sheet, and realize you have no record of what date this data was pulled — so next quarter you cannot tell if the numbers changed.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet, understands what you are looking at, and through its built-in WakaTime integration it pulls global aggregate stats directly — no page-scraping, no typed-in approximations.
Open your language benchmarking sheet and paste this:
Fetch WakaTime aggregate stats for the past year and fill this sheet with columns: Language, Total Hours (global), Percentage Share — sorted by hours descending, top 30 rows
What You Get
- 30 rows, one per language, sorted from highest to lowest global coding hours.
- Total Hours (global) as a large integer representing aggregate hours across all WakaTime users.
- Percentage Share as a decimal percentage (e.g., 14.3 for 14.3% of global coding time).
- The data reflects the trailing 12-month window WakaTime uses for its aggregate stats endpoint.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want separate tables for languages, editors, and operating systems
WakaTime's aggregate API covers more than just languages:
Pull WakaTime global aggregate coding statistics and populate this sheet with separate sections for Language, Editor, and OS — each with Name, Hours, Percentage columns. Put Language starting at row 1, Editor starting at row 35, OS starting at row 60.
You want to find your language's rank and highlight it
Your language is Elixir. You want its row highlighted or flagged:
Fetch WakaTime aggregate stats for the past year, sorted descending by hours. Include all languages in the results. Add a Rank column (1 for highest). Add a Flag column: write "OUR LANGUAGE" next to Elixir, leave blank for all others. Fill this sheet with Rank, Language, Total Hours, Percentage Share, Flag.
You want to track quarter-over-quarter changes
You already have last quarter's data in columns A through C. You want this quarter's data next to it:
Fetch WakaTime aggregate stats for the past year, top 30 languages by hours. Paste this quarter's results starting in column E with headers: Language Q2, Hours Q2, Share Q2 — in the same language order as column A so I can compare rows directly.
Full competitive benchmark table in one pull
Fetch WakaTime global aggregate stats for the past year. Sort descending by hours. Include top 30 languages. Add a Rank column starting at 1. Flag the row for Elixir with "OUR LANGUAGE" in a Notes column. Add a Snapshot Date column with today's date on every row. Fill this sheet starting at row 2 with Rank, Language, Total Hours, Percentage Share, Notes, Snapshot Date.
The board presentation gets real data with a pull date attached.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your quarterly language benchmark sheet — ask it to pull the current WakaTime global language rankings with share percentages and a snapshot date, so leadership sees numbers, not approximations from a page you read three weeks ago. See also how to export a language breakdown from WakaTime, or return to the WakaTime integration overview.