WebIdiot.Online

The Save Button That Did Nothing

Have you ever clicked Save on a long form and watched absolutely nothing happen?No toast. No red text. No movement. Just a button that seems to be ignoring you.That was our app. We build long forms: profile pages, multi-section settings, repeatable blocks like "contacts" or "addresses". Here's what kept happening:The user fills in the visible part of the form and clicks Save, which sits in a sticky header.Validation fails on a field far below the fold, or inside the third item of a repeatable li

Splitting PDFs in the browser: a forgiving page-range parser, synced thumbnails and a ZIP that sorts correctly

I'm the developer of MakeQuickWork, a small set of free browser tools. This post walks through how its Split PDF tool works, with the parts that took longer than I expected."Split PDF" sounds like a one-liner: open the document, copy some pages, save. The copying really is the easy part. What took most of the time was everything around it: letting people describe pages the way they naturally write them, keeping a text field and clickable thumbnails in agreement, and producing output files that b

Building AfriWidget: How I Built 100+ Free Online Tools Using HTML, CSS and JavaScript

From an idea to a growing collection of practical web applications. A look at the development process, technical decisions, challenges and lessons behind AfriWidget.Building software is interesting. Building software that people can actually use to solve everyday problems is even more interesting.When I started working on AfriWidget, I wasn't trying to create another website filled with random online calculators. I wanted to build something more useful: a collection of practical digital tools th

I built 35+ browser PDF & AI contract tools, got 0 users for 2 months, and realized Cloudflare was blocking Googlebot

<p><a href="https://docsy.top" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://docsy.top</a> as an experimental project, realizing your sitemap and Cloudflare settings were blocking search crawlers for two months, and redesigning the homepage around clean, no-signup everyday paperwork tools (Merge PDF, Unlock PDF, Contract Generator, Invoice Generator). Ask people to test a tool and tell you what breaks.</p>

Secrets Don&#039;t Leak in One Moment: The 6 Ways They Slip Into Your Repo (and How to Catch Each One)

Last year I found a production database password in one of my own public repos. Not a test password. Not a placeholder. The real one, in a config file, visible to anyone who knew how to read git history. It had been there for 8 months.I didn't find it during an audit. I found it because a friend asked a question that made me look.That's the uncomfortable truth about secret leaks: they almost never happen in one dramatic moment. There's no single "oops, I committed the .env" incident you can poin

One editor, three runtimes: Bun, Browser, and the one in between

Here are five lines of JavaScript:"document" in globalThis;"Bun" in globalThis;globalThis.process?.versions?.bun ?? "not Bun";import { readdir } from "node:fs/promises";(await readdir(".")).length;What do they print?It depends on where they run. Run them in Bun and there's no document, there is a Bun, and readdir counts your files. Run them in a browser and document is there, Bun isn't, and that node:fs import doesn't make it past the build.Most of us switch between those worlds all day. This po

Rendering four billion years of continental drift in the browser

Scrub a timeline and watch the planet rebuild itself. That’s the whole idea: a 3D Earth you can drag backwards through geological time, with the continents drifting apart and the entire look of the world, oceans, land, atmosphere, ice, changing to match the era you’re standing in.It’s a Wildlab experiment, built with React Three Fiber and three.js. Not a product; a place to keep our creative-technology muscles warm. It uses the same WebGL and shader techniques that drive the morphing animals on

Ask HN: Help My Sanity

I have been applying for jobs since this year, and I have been hanging in by the threads. For the past 7 years I have been doing freelance work, and it&#x27;s been great until the AI boom.I am a software developer with 13 years of experience, and this year is the first time I am getting frustrated with my career. I have no money to help myself or my family. I have this little space in my house that can help me start up a small chicken poultry farm, but I have no funds for it. All my savings exha

On Writing

&#x201c;If you want a recipe for making a writer, have them feel a little out of place everywhere. Have them be an observer all the time.&#x201d;--Lin-Manuel MirandaFor 100s more On Writing posts, go here.The Protagonist&#x2019;s Journey: An Introduction to Character-Driven Screenwriting and Storytellingis a #1 Best Seller in Film and Television. Endorsed by over thirty professional screenwriters, novelists, and academics, you may purchase it here.

Go Into The Story Interview (Part 4): Omar Al Dakheel and Elie El Choufany

Omar Al Dakheel and Elie El Choufany wrote the original screenplay The Washroom which won a 2025-2026 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. I had an hour-long conversation with the pair exploring their creative backgrounds, analyzing their Nicholl-winning screenplay, and a discussion of key aspects of the screenwriting craft.Today in Part 4, Omar, Elie, and I discuss the father-son relationship which lies at the core of The Washroom, plus, their use of the visual throughout the script: water.Scot

Show HN: Sectr – Serverless backend platform for easy deployment of AI agents

Hey HN, I&#x27;ve been building Sectr, a backend-as-a-service for making it easy(ier) to develop and deploy AI agents. Deploying agents requires non-trivial systems design work. Consider a support agent: how do you stream messages to your frontend, how&#x2F;where do you persist messages for frontend fetching later (or for auditing), and when the agent wants to issue a refund, do you spin-down the compute infra while it&#x27;s waiting on human approval? Sectr aims to be the serverless abstraction

Building Cursor-style inline AI editing in React with Anky UI

A user wants a shorter paragraph. Moving that paragraph into a chat window adds a second workflow: copy the text, switch context, explain the task, copy the answer, paste it back, then remove the conversational preamble.An inline editor can keep the task in one place: select, rewrite, compare, accept. Anky UI supplies the interaction primitives for that flow. This article walks through how to connect them without giving the model direct ownership of your document.Repository: https://github.com/E

GSTR-2B Reconciliation Made Simple

The Challenge of Manual ReconciliationFor Indian SMBs, reconciling the purchase register against the GSTR‑2B feed is a monthly chore that involves thousands of invoice line items. Each line must be matched by vendor, GSTIN, invoice number, amount, tax rate, and HSN code. The current manual workflow relies on spreadsheets, ad‑hoc filters, and a lot of trial‑and‑error. Even a single misplaced comma can trigger a cascade of “unmatched” flags, forcing finance teams to dig through logs and re‑e

I built a study tracker on a $12/month Kubernetes cluster. Here&#039;s the stack and what I learned

I kept starting learning roadmaps (DSA, system design, AI engineering) and then losing track: what I'd covered, how much time I'd really put in, and what was next. Spreadsheets didn't stick. So I built Gradiaqo, a free app that turns any subject into a study plan and tracks your progress. What it doesReady-made paths: DSA, System Design, AI Engineer and Data ScientistYour own paths: build one in the app, or import it from a spreadsheet or YAML fileStudy sessions: log your time and watch you

Tech market feels like a data entry job

I spent two hours every day filling my resume data to freshly developed forms made specifically to the hiring process of one or two companies.I have a good resume, worked well for a few years before AI, and know it has got a lot harder to land a development gig. I&#x27;ve worked with modern stuff like AI-generated briefs for our meetings, for our bug logs, even for our Q.A. team email replies. Hell, there was an Agent dedicated to verifying how well our code was written at my last job, so I feel

Watch movies. Read scripts. Write pages.

You can learn pretty much everything you need to know about screenwriting by doing these three things:Watch movies.Read scripts.Write pages.Why watch movies?Because to be a good screenwriter, you need to have a broad exposure to the world of film. Every movie you see is a potential reference point for your writing, everything from story concepts you generate to characters you develop to scenes you construct. Moreover, people who work in the movie business constantly reference existing movies whe

Redux Toolkit in React

What Is Redux Toolkit?Redux Toolkit (RTK) is a library used to manage global state in React applications. It is the official, recommended way to write Redux logic.In React, we use useState to manage data inside a component. But when multiple components need the same data, sharing and updating that data can become difficult.For example, in an e-commerce application, the Navbar displays the cart count, and the Cart component displays the cart items. Both components need access to the same da

Show Dev: FakeMess Cloud – In-browser, privacy-first chat mockup generator

Hey DEV Community! 👋I'm excited to share a project I've been building: FakeMess Cloud — a free, realistic chat mockup generator designed for developers, UI/UX designers, creators, and meme makers.Most chat generators on the web today suffer from three frustrating issues:Intrusive Ads &amp; Forced Signups: Plagued with paywalls, spammy ads, or watermarks.Western-Centric App Presets: Almost all existing tools only support WhatsApp or iMessage.Privacy Concerns: Many tools send conversation snippets

Bilgo

Hey DEV Community! 👋I'm excited to share a project I've been working on: Bilgo — a real-time multiplayer trivia and brain arena.The core idea was to build a fast, competitive, and interactive quiz platform where players can challenge friends in real-time, climb competitive ranked leagues, and explore themed challenges.It's completely cross-platform, built with Kotlin (Jetpack Compose) on Android, React on the web, and powered by Firebase for live synchronization.I’d love for you to check i

How to send email from Next.js with OwnMailServer

To send email from Next.js, call an email API from server code: a route handler or a Server Action, never a client component. With OwnMailServer that's one fetch to POST https://api.ownmailserver.com/emails, with your API key read from an environment variable. If your app already uses Resend's SDK or React Email, keep the code: set RESEND_BASE_URL=https://api.ownmailserver.com and swap in our API key.Your situationUseNew packagesStarting freshfetch to POST /emailsNoneAlready on Resend's SDKThe s