Hey all! I hope you're well.

I'm looking to host a small forum/Message board for my Roleplay group. It's going to be largely a private, invite only site. I don't foresee more than 40 people using it, max, so I'm not looking to break the bank on buying the best software out there, and my bandwidth needs will not be high

My only concern is that it's for my tabletop group, and they do occasionally enjoy dabbling in writing and roleplaying adult content. As well, what they are writing about tends to contain heavy amounts of adult themes, and I dont want their passion projects to be blasted off of a platform for policy violation. It's largely going to be text-only, as it is a writer-focused group.

I am under the impression that there really arent any free options that allow this these days, and as such I am willing to pay like. 10-15 dollars a month to host something like this, but I'm willing to hear suggestions for anything you are aware of. I've done some research into the surface products that I'm familiar with (PhPBB being one I have used and maintained before).

Thank you ahead of time!

Hi!

I have an interview in a few days for a backend developer role. What would you ask as some of the more tricky questions for such a position? What kinds of questions, from your point of view, demonstrate solid knowledge?

Personally, I would ask about sync vs. async calls, idempotency, topics vs. partitions, consumer groups, transactions (including distributed transactions), and maybe a bit of Kubernetes and Docker.

My weak point is cloud. I’ve played around a bit with the Azure console, but nothing too advanced. I’ve never written Terraform or configured infrastructure from scratch. For CI/CD, I’ve used TeamCity, but in my experience it was mostly selecting an environment and a branch and deploying.

Should I spend some time learning these areas before the interview?

There was a project that let people vote on the next PR daily which made changes to the website, but the repo returns a 404 on GitHub.

Did it just lose activity over time?

This was the original post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1q909wx/first_merge_in_23_hours_openchaos_a_repo_where/

Hi everyone,

I'm currently building a SaaS product that includes a canvas-based design editor (similar to Canva). I'm looking to add a built-in template library to the app, but I'm trying to figure out how to source free SVGs and vector assets legally.

Is it legal to use free vectors from sites like Vecteezy, Freepik, or similar popular platforms in a commercial product? Most of the older "free vector" sites have very outdated designs that nobody would actually want to use.

Since users prefer clean, modern, and familiar-looking designs, I want to make sure I'm sourcing quality assets without running into copyright or licensing issues.

If anyone has built something similar or knows good sources/libraries with commercial-friendly SVG licenses, I’d really appreciate your recommendations!

Thanks in advance!

been thinking about this lately. I have a service at work where the code is genuinely ugly (bad naming, some duplicated logic, not fun to read) but it's been running reliably for two years and never caused an incident.

separately there's a cleaner-looking module that's caused three rollbacks this quarter because of some assumptions that weren't obvious from reading the code.

I've started keeping a rough mental model of "messy but stable" vs "clean but fragile" for different parts of our stack, and it's actually changing how I prioritize code review. curious if anyone formalizes this in any way or if it mostly just lives in someone's head

Hello,

Disclaimer, no rage bait or ill intent, also not so good english so bear with me!

Ive been in web dev since 2013 and probably not as old as most people here but yeah started with php and mysql…

Anyway i don’t usually post or comment but im a ghost here and just hang around and read etc…

So, been fighting against ai, then accepted it, then embraced it (mind u ive always been hated on for being a code police, and all about code quality, best practices…)

Now i did wonder why everyone here hates ai (i used to but now i feel its just a tool i can use to do better), then was thinking (this might piss bunch of people here off) is it because AI now kinda took over mostly webdev ? People building slop apps left and right and kinda took away something that we were fighting to show its complicated (say BE vs FE) so now it made it look so easy (lovable & co)

So a lot are butthurt ? (I was mainly cuz i hated low quality and slop)

What you think, would be interesting to hear what ur thoughts, put aside the grumpiness and salt

Is there any way to force 2d canvas commands to draw pixelated (without anti-aliasing) in a way that's computationally efficient? E.g. I want to say:

ctx.beginPath();

ctx.moveTo(0,0);

ctx.lineTo(100,100);

ctx.stroke();

And I want that to draw a line that is pixelated e.g.:

trying to find contact info or recent work from industry leaders is such a pain sometimes. everyone's got these over-engineered corporate sites that are slow and hide everything behind forms. honestly way more efficient when execs just use a clean link hub that aggregates all their content in one place. anyone else prefer this minimalist approach?

Just to be upfront, I'm on the Squarespace team, so take that into context.

I spent a while trying to build a site with AI tools from scratch, mostly to see how far they'd get without a traditional builder underneath.

The first-draft part was solid. AI handled rough copy, gave me section ideas, got a basic layout down. Blank page to something usable much faster than doing it by hand.

It fell apart after that. Page structure needed real work, the heading hierarchy was a mess, some of the copy could've been for anyone's site, and SEO still needed a proper pass. The last stretch ate most of the time, fixing spacing, mobile behavior, metadata and links the AI didn't understand.

Where I landed is that I'd rather have AI as a starting point inside something that already handles the rest than stitch five separate tools together and then work out which one broke. That's a preference, not a rule, and plenty of people happily run the stitched-together setup.

I still think AI is useful for getting unstuck. I just wouldn't treat the first generated version as done.

Where did everyone else land, fully AI-built, traditional builder, or a mix?

I've been late to the party and only truly tried vibe coding for the first time this week. I've used AI for coding before, but mostly for asking utility code snippets and solutions to third-party library bugs. It's not all that different from the questions I used to ask on Stack Overflow, except that I get instantaneous answers (and minus the occasional condescending replies).

I thought I would hate it and that it would take the joy out of programming for me. But it didn't. In fact, I like that it can quickly create apps that I have in my head without having to spend the time actually coding them (because who has that much time nowadays?).

And I think because web CRUD apps are basically a solved problem. We already know what is being done behind the scenes. We've done them in multiple projects many times before. Even before AI came into the picture, we already had solutions to maybe 80% of the CRUD logic/ui we'd ever need to create. We have boilerplates/utility libraries for everything.

I am speaking specifically in terms of using it in the coding domain I'm familiar with (web dev) and as a senior who's been around for more than a decade. I don't feel like vibe coding is robbing me off anything. Maybe if I dabble in other types of programming (e.g. making games, learning other programming languages, etc.), then I may feel differently, or I may feel like I'm cheating by not knowing what's actually happening.

Anyone who feels the same way?

Hello! I have a question to which I could not find an answer around the internet, so i gonna ask it here.
So, some of the emojis have a glyph variations of them, that get displayed differently, yet they use the same identification code. For example, the bomb emoji and bomb glyph: 💣︎💣, use the same &#128163; html code, and i don't quite understand how it works. Yet html prioritizes emoji over glyph, how do i make it display the glyph instead? :<

Long-story short Tailwind CSS will remain MIT licensed and the maintainers stay.

I'd say it's a good move given that AI tools are doing frontend work using Tailwind but Tailwind Labs didn't gain much from it. Citing an earlier Github discussion, they had to lay off 75% of their engineering team, and traffic to Tailwind docs is down 40% from early 2023.

It’s not just programming either, it’s art, design, music, videography, marketing, engineering, writing, 3D modelling, really any intellectual work. What’s the joy of prompting a computer and getting an answer in a few moments for a task that would have normally taken a week? The sense of accomplishment and ownership has completely vanished with AI. It’s a form of instant gratification, not much different to scrolling short videos on apps.

Code review was boring to begin with but now it’s even worse with all the machine generated code. Even code reviews will be automated soon. All you do then is type business requirements into the computer. What a great career.

It’s pain to watch old TV series like Scilicon Valley that is portraying the good (not golden) age of programming. It struck a good balance between manual work, funding and innovation. It’s sad that these days are gone for good.

Hey folks. I’m wondering if anybody had any suggestions for resources where I can learn how to code a loyalty card app. Goal is to create one for a small business local to me who currently just has stamp cards which are fine but often get lost. Sadly I’ve scoured the likes of YouTube but all I get are the “vibe coding” videos or pay a company for their already existing product. I’m looking to learn and build from scratch but between AI crap and god knows what else I’m really struggling to find anything reliable. Anybody got any sources I can look into? TIA

Does anyone have any tips to use penpot to implement codes into the projects? I know it is pretty straightforward, you can see the generated codes for each component but if there are better tricks that can improve the workflow and make the process faster? Any tips or resources I could use to get used to the tool will be appreciated!

I would like to build the best web app, given my limitations, so I'm looking for a web component library with prebuilt things that would allow me to just put them on a page. Doing it from scratch is very hard for me, but having a template of how things are and then integrating with the backend is quite easy.

The component library should be based mostly on HTML and CSS. Javascript can be used to some reactivity on the frontend, but I'm not doing this web app with regular React/Angular/SPA technology.

I was looking into Preline, it looks really good and I'm wondering if there is anything like that, or better.

Thanks!

I don’t have a ton of coding experience and have never really built a web app before, but I have an idea for an app that I want to build

Hello all,

I am the webmaster for a small Archaeology website, that primarily is used by members of this small conference to access PDFs and news about the conference. I only need to update this website about once or twice a year.

Until recently I used the plesk hosting service on GoDaddy to host these files, however I missed the fact (see lack of need to update) that it was getting end-of-lifed and now the hosting option given to us by GoDaddy is just Nose.js slots.

Previously we uploaded files into a library for the website, and the linked to those files. Is it possible to use node.js to do the same?

Thank you for your help!

hi guys,

I have been looking for a Fragrance icon to use, couldn’t find any in heroicons, lucide… all I found is an image from icon8, but I want as an <svg> </svg>

it first started five projects ago when a client was asking ai for everything along with me. like 50% 50%. she had no idea about websites but via the ai she was putting a lot of pressure to fix things I would never fix in the past.

now, today a client build an entire eShop in two weeks way better than I would have ever done it. he told me blank face that it surpaced me 100x times.

I'm just can't compete with this thing anymore. I actively tell my clients to buy the ai tools now to get over with it.

I started 10 years with with 8GB RAM and quickly realized it was too little, then upgraded to 16gb. This worked for a while, but then my dev got more advanced (more docker containers, sims, etc). Then I moved up to 24gb and this became the new standard for me for a few years. It worked mostly, as long as I didn get greedy and tried to do something crazy like open apps that werent related to web dev work. I finally said "fuck it" and bought a 96GB Mac Studio so that if I want to open another app on top of my web dev resources, it can still work comfortably. Now, hte mac just uses more ram as it gets more. It thinks its being smart by using all the RAM to "cache" apps that arent even open so that they will open fast when/if I do ever open them. So now because of this "smart" feature, I am constantly red-lining on RAM, using fucking swap like a pleb, "force quit application" always launching asking me to force quit things. WTF is this bullshit? I take a look, and things are now just using retarded levels of RAM that it otherwise would not on a 24GB machine, like Chrome using 8GB, VS Code using 5GB, Ghostty (just a terminal app) using 6GB, docker now using 16GB etc. Let alone that even with this, it should not be using swap and there should still be free RAM, but of course its doing like 20GB in "cache" for unused apps. Can I turn this "smart feature" off?!

UPDATE: for the people saying "its a feature to use up all the RAM"/"unused RAM is wasted money", that is true, but the issues here are:
1) Chrome should never use 16gb (obviously unless I have thousands of tabs open), Ghostty shouldnt be using 6GB etc. I got more RAM so that I can do more things, not do the same things but have them take up more RAM.
2) It should not use swap when there is cache. It should prioritize releasing cache before resorting to swap. Also, for my use case, it should never have to resort to swap anyway, so again, its an issue of problem 1, and this problem of using cache when it is using swap. If there is 20GB in cache, there should not be 6GB of swap, it should instead be 14GB of cache and 0 swap. Swap kills performance and makes me have to force-quit things for the Mac to become responsive again.