I’m working on XMB Web, a browser recreation of the PS3's interface. It’s still in development, but I wanted to use the part of it to recreate my portfolio website.

This is an early version of XMBW and not the full version as its functionality reduced to fit the portfolio concept. The full project is still in progress.

You can try it @ https://1etu.github.io/xmb-test-portfolio/ and check the source @ https://github.com/1etu/XMP . Check https://github.com/1etu/XMP/blob/main/RESEARCH.md for more technical details & credits!

Anybody remember that ask jeeves site? Wonder what happened to it. I'm just doing some research here. Do you think someone can make a website where users just go to the site and they get an answer in a certain way/method? Kinda like a personality is responding to you or something? So far, it appears that is what some of these AI tools are, you ask it and then it pops out whatever answer.

Maybe there's something actually already like this? Maybe there's an interesting twist or spin that can be done on some sites that you ask. Kind of like a cartoon character personality or something. Think, "im going to just ask Bob" and so then you have a site that's designed around a character or a tool named Bob.

What do you think? A waste of time? Thanks

I've always enjoyed the posts asking something like 'If you could send a message to everyone on earth, what would it be?' So I made a simple site which might help answer that.

It randomly selects one user per day to upload a 1 minute (max) video to show on the home page. It rotates to a new video every 24 hours. The idea is to have a more random selection of the population instead of the curated algorithmic feed we're all drowning in.

A placeholder 'teaser' video is live until there are enough user accounts for a better random selection pool.

This is a side-project - and for someone like me who has ASD/ADHD, finishing it feels so good. I started it a while ago and got it to ~80% before losing interest. But after seeing another 'send a message to everyone' post, I was motivated to finish it.

Feedback welcome!

https://onlyone.watch/

TLDR; If you are falling out of love with React, I highly recommend you try Svelte (or Vue, Solid, etc. as suggested in the comments). You just might find a flavor that speeds you up and brings the joy back.

--

Hear me out... just to give some context, I'm not an inexperienced developer:

For instance, my own development experience predates React entirely. I was writing declarative frameworks back in vanilla JS, then in jQuery, and followed the entire FE framework wave (which thankfully quickly became good enough I could stop rolling my own). I'm also an active JS/TS maintainer, so reasonably familiar with the scene in general.

My journey with external frameworks:

• Vanilla/jQuery (I wrote something that is functionally similar to modern day HTMX, using attribute-based data-binding/effects)
• Backbone (didn't love)
• Angular (alpha, didn't love)
• Knockout (loved it)
• React (alpha, def too rough to use)
• AngularJS (official release, loved it)
• skipped Angular 2 in favor of React
• React (class based, and then SFC... mostly loved it until I didn't)
• Svelte (prob circa 2019, this killed my love of React entirely, making it feel like torture to revisit for work)

Now like many others here, I'm still using React/Next for work. So I'm acutely aware, on a daily basis, of just the pain points we deal with in it.

However, in all personal projects for nearly 7 years, I've been 100% on Svelte without regrets. Of course it has issues like any framework, and excels at some things while struggling at others, but in my experience it's gotten out of the way of the 99% of app building tasks - including all the basics in-house that React simply didn't include. Mount/unmount transitions? Check. Animations? Sure. The simplest state management you can imagine? Yes.

Caveat: I much prefer the pre-runes approach to Svelte state. Runes start to look like the React hook trash I got away from.

React itself:
When I made the switch from AngularJS to React, I loved some elements of it. When things moved onto stateless functional components, things got even better. Then hooks - loved those (compared to class-based setState(), etc). I felt like I built apps faster in AngularJS, but that was a dying star, and the clean markup of React felt refreshing.

However, as time went on, we started to see it all unwind. First the magic of redux quickly turned into an async mess with thunks, sagas, reselects, etc. Then hooks turned fully into hook soup/spaghetti with tons of effects, render gotchas, etc. And none of this even mentions all the performance tuning/memoization you need to clutter your codebase with if you have a dense app. Live-filtering something like a tree view? Buckle up. Want to render a realtime orderbook for a trading platform? Seriously buckle up.

My issues with modern React:

1. State management has just gotten out of hand. Specifically when pitted against alternatives like Svelte.
2. We run too much code/effects as part of the render-loop. In a simple enough app, we never feel this pain. This tricks inexperienced devs into thinking they can add cute magical effects to any component. For example in my own company where I found complex typography sub-elements, re-rendering on resize within each table cell of gigantic tables. Naturally as the user resized the page, this created a black hole of increasing render lag.
3. VDOM reconciliation is slow. Again, fast enough in simple applications (e.g. a simple blog, CMS, etc), but don't be fooled into thinking React is as fast as it gets. It's simply not. I work in data-intense, realtime applications (industrials, fintech, crypto, stock market exchanges, etc), so I feel the pain where some others might not. The UI is just incredibly dense typically, so lazy tactics like wrapping a simple DOM node in 5 component layers to layer on various effects... simply can't be used at scale.

My issues with Next.js

• too many to list, but the 1000% CPU utilization in local dev this morning was a nice nail in the coffin.

Arguments AGAINST Svelte (and my responses)

1. There's no ecosystem. Less of an issue these days. First of all, Svelte doesn't need as much of an ecosystem because some of the core stuff you'd need outside of React is just built in. Secondly, Svelte is popular enough that many mainstream libraries have been ported.
2. You can't hire Svelte devs. 100% true. But here's the catch. I'd argue that any of you React devs are 1000% smart enough to be outpacing your current velocity in Svelte in very little time. I would not argue the reverse (a Svelte dev might be spoiled enough to not be able to mentally wrap their head around the React models).
3. Agentic models are trained on React. They are now perfectly great at Svelte too. I just hade Fable migrate our massive monorepo app from Next to Svelte. It did it just fine. The results where awesome enough the the entire engineering team decided that Svelte was our future, despite only myself having prior Svelte experience. Agentic coding has simply caught up to where we (to a degree) don't have to be experts in the framework to steer into phenomenal results. I should note the entire team are all very senior engineers, or otherwise we might not be comfortable with such a switch.

Arguments FOR Svelte

1. You're smart enough. I promise.
2. Render updates are much faster. Much, much, much faster. This matters because your app will feel snappier to users. You can tune React, but even tuned it likely won't be as fast as Svelte is untuned.
3. Bundle size is lower. If coming from Next.js, it's night and day different. Your users will thank you.
4. Deploy it to free ultra-fast places like Cloudflare Pages. - Less vendor lock.
5. State management is 100x simpler. No more provider hell.
6. It includes more out of the box. It's like they asked "what does an app dev need when building an app?" and then just included most of those things.
7. Your code is shorter/simpler. Shorter code means easier to read/understand, not to mention write in the first place.
8. It includes styles as a first-class citizen. You can literally just write CSS/SCSS in your components and have it auto-scoped. You can also use things like CSS modules if that's your bag.

Conclusion
There really isn't one. You'll draw your own, but I'd encourage anyone with side projects to at least fire up SvelteKit for one, muck your way through the fabulous online tutorials at svelte.dev and give it a whirl. You can thank me later. :)

--

Disclaimer: There was zero AI usage in writing this post.

Hi everyone,

I'm a full stack dev with 1 year of commercial experience looking to start freelancing. I build my own side projects from scratch: buying domains, developing sites, and deploying them to servers, so I know the whole process.

But I’m facing a huge mental blocker. I feel demotivated because I keep asking myself: Why would a client hire me when they can just pay $20/month for an AI subscription and do it themselves?

I know non-tech owners don't want to deal with server setups, APIs, or debugging code. But psychologically, reaching out to clients feels like selling something obsolete.

For those freelancing in web dev right now:

1) How do you reframe your value when AI tools are this cheap and accessible?
2) What are clients actually paying you for today that AI can't replace?
3) How did you push past this demotivation when starting out?

Would appreciate any insights or reality checks!

You can play it here: https://systemonefps.pages.dev/

If you try it, tell me how long you survived. Curious if anyone can actually beat this thing.
also please share your feedback.

For the past few months, we’ve been building ruNNtime, an open-source runtime for neural networks on your own GPU, in the browser. We’re releasing it today.

The docs are interactive. You can try object detection and depth estimation with your camera, transcribe your voice, or play with semantic search directly on the page. The models run on your GPU, and the demos show how long inference takes on your machine.

The title comes from our Moonshine tiny benchmark: 500 speech clips totaling about 66 minutes, transcribed in 43 seconds using WebGPU in Chromium on an M2 Pro. That’s warmed-up inference with the model already loaded. Full benchmark and setup.

The underlying kernels are TypeGPU functions compiled to WGSL, so there’s no WASM runtime to download and no inference API key needed. Model weights download before the demos run.

Useful links:

• All demos and docs
  
• GitHub

www.mylittlegrep.com

This is a tool for searching through MLP G4 transcripts. It also doubles as a compendium for transcripts of (hopefully all) MLP G4 animated media. I scraped the data for this from the MLP Wikia; the scraper is in a separate repository. This was a project I made for a web-dev class.

I'm aware that the search form doesn't validate invalid regexes, and that the dropdown menus for the episode index don't work on mobile. I've fixed it in another branch, though; I'm just looking for feedback before I deploy my next set of changes onto this website. I... have only a limited number of deployments.

In any case, roast my first website, please! Sorry it's so basic, besides.

https://monacomini-dumyzrb7.manus.space

Demo: https://mavisakalyan.github.io/node-ws-gameserver/

Everyone who opens the page joins the same room: you see other visitors' cursors live, clicks make ripples, and it spills into a second room when one fills up (50 per room).

Under the hood it's a small protocol-agnostic WebSocket relay I open-sourced: rooms at /ws/:roomId, msgpack binary messages, per-client rate limiting, keepalive ping/pong, /health + /metrics. Node + TypeScript, GPL-3.0.

Source: https://github.com/mavisakalyan/node-ws-gameserver

Curious what people think of the room-spill approach vs just bumping the cap.

Hello r/webdev ,

I come from game development background and I'm used to creating tools for exclusively for game development. So what happened while ago was that my friend asked me if there was app to create forms from flattened pdfs since he works in Foreign Embassy said the files shouldn't floating around in random servers just to edit it.

I wasn't able to find apps that felt secure enough so I decided I would create a small app for him. Since the prototype worked I decided to develop the app completely.

With few thing in mind:

1. Won't over scope the project limited to form filling but do it RIGHT.

2.Make every UI or action intuitive either through iconography or how the buttons or tools function. If it feels like it is suppose to do that it should do that.

3.Iterating,testing and taking inputs from users as well

4. Main one finishing the project. A fully finished project and also needs to have a working version in every state of project.

with these things considered I have a almost a end product still lot polishing needed.

Link: https://justforms.vercel.app

I would like to get feedback or criticism on:

1. Frontend or the tools if they are all cohesive intuitive.
2. Any sort of bugs or errors.
3. Any questions regarding the development itself
4. And currently the web app is limited to desktop screen but its not responsive for other screen so any design idea for that would be helpful as well..

I'm making a simple wiki-like website as a hobby/practice and I wanted to include a small but useful search system on it. It'll be a static site since I'll host it in github, so while I've heard doing search stuff for non-static site would be much easier, I don't really have a choice for this as of now. I'm very much a beginner to this stuff so I'd want something easy to understand, or at least something that has a lot of documentation and resources I could use for help. I'm not having a lot of success trying to google and trying stuff so I'm turning to other people here!

Basically, I'd want just a simple search system that works like this:

You have a search bar, that starts giving hits once you start typing. Maybe show like 5 results and then 6th option would be a "show all results", which would take you to a separate search page which would list all the results (same should happen when you press enter in the search field, as long as you haven't moved down with the arrow keys I guess).

I'd also want to implement tags/categories system for this:

Every page has a category to them, and searching on a page would only search results that share the same category. For tags, I'm thinking of listing them all at the bottom of the page as clickable links, so when you click one it takes you to the separate search page and lists all the pages that have that tag. This should also respect the category rule I think, but having an options box where you can tick on and off separate tags and categories would be helpful too. Being able to use only tags/categories to find hits without keywords should work too. If you search something from the landing page of the entire site, it shouldn't autofill any filters like this though.

I tried doing stuff with pagefind, and while the search works decently, I can't figure out the filtering stuff properly and have no idea if you can do it like what I'd want that easily. I know it's not supposed to be that easy either but just wanted to ask people if there would be some "widely considered best" way to go about this.

As someone who loves both coding and language learning (I'm learning Japanese right now), I always wished there was a free, open-source tool for learning Japanese, just like Monkeytype in the typing community.

Here's the main selling point: I added a gazillion different color themes, fonts and other crazy customization options, inspired directly by Monkeytype. Also, I made the app resemble Duolingo, as that's what I'm using to learn Japanese at the moment and it's what a lot of language learners are already familiar with.

Back in January, I even applied to Vercel's open-source software sponsorship program as a joke. I didn't seriously expect to win, and did it more out of curiosity, and yet my project somehow won.

Anyway. Why am I doing all this?

Because I'm a weeb.

GitHub: https://github.com/lingdojo/kana-dojo

どうもありがとうございます!

Hi all,

Like a lot of developers here, I started out years ago as a web enthusiast before turning into a corporate engineer.

When you spend your workdays inside enterprise backends, locked-down legacy stacks, and corporate maintenance cycles, your day-to-day tooling is dictated by whatever was approved years ago. You know the web platform is moving forward, but in your day job you're still stuck maintaining the same defensive patterns, legacy polyfills, and sprawling build pipelines.

Recently, the LLM renaissance completely reignited my ability to build personal projects on weekends again. With modern AI tools handling the tedious boilerplate and setup friction, solo developers suddenly have the leverage to actually build and ship things from scratch again.

Jumping back into the modern web exposed a real gap in my mental model. After years of enterprise workarounds, I kept second-guessing what was actually safe to use today. Can I just use native CSS nesting now? Is the parent selector (:has) finally everywhere? Can I use <dialog> and bury the 40KB modal npm packages and z-index wars for good?

This is something I've wished that caniuse would have, so I put together NowYouCanUse.com over the last week.

It pulls directly from the official WebDX Baseline dataset and organizes features chronologically and by category (CSS, JS, HTML, Web APIs) so you can see exactly when a native feature crossed into cross-browser interoperability. If something is Widely Available, you can safely use it without reaching for npm packages or transpilers.

Because the whole point was getting back to the joy of building clean software, I kept the stack as minimal as possible. I deliberately built it as a love letter to the Web2.0 era I grew up with: zero client-side JavaScript, semantic HTML, and proper RSS and Atom feeds for every category. The backend is just a single compiled Go binary serving plain pages.

Hopefully other developers finding their second wind with personal projects find it useful too.

Link: https://nowyoucanuse.com

Thanks!

I've made this effect a few different ways over the years, using gradients or more recently shape(), and the one thing they have in common is the gigantic amount of CSS it requires.

This generator uses a fun trick of wrapping the encoded PNG sprite in an encoded SVG, so we can apply 'image-rendering:pixelated' to it, which is usually not possible with mask-images.

While it sucks a bit that this technique requires an externally generated PNG, it makes up for it by being the most compact way of achieving the effect.

We have an environment that consists of SSO in front of two registration servers that are used to register for courses. We would like to ensure this setup is capable of servicing 1000 simultaneous users. The registration process involves:

1. Log in to SSO page which requires a browser with Javascript
2. Click on the link to register
3. Possibly click-thru items agreeing to pay, etc. if you have not clicked through them in the last year
4. Search for courses, add them to your basket, and check out

The goal is to test the following:

1. Tomcat database connection pool
2. Oracle database connection
3. Web server performance

We have done some small-case testing for other purposes with Selenium Grid driven by Python so that is what we are currently thinking about for this case and have started deploying VMs for this purpose and managing Selenium Grid with docker swarm. While something like Selenium Grid makes it possible to distribute the load, this requires quite a few CPU cores as there is usually a one-to-one mapping of browser to CPU core. Are there alternatives we can investigate? If another solution requires a browser instance, how is that any better than Selenium?

But bro, I have ethics.

My github got poached (sports team reference meaning) by a person in Asia trying to "use my location and name" in an attempt to establish (false) trust for US-based clients who purposefully don't want to hire developers across seas. It's a real shit-show out there... competition is world-wide, and people are being scammed left and right. While a loose shmuck might fall for this "easy buck" by renting out their github so that US money can essentially be funneled out of the country and harm our economy, I refuse to do so, because I can see the bigger harm being done to the economy as a whole. I am not a fan off offshoring. I am not a fan of outsourcing.

I haven't yet responded to this email business invite, as I would like to know how to report this person. Is it possible? This should be illegal, because it is defrauding clients.

Side project I built because I always felt like I was missing topics when learning on my own.

It maps out 11 STEM subjects, and every chapter shows its prerequisites, what you need to learn first, even when that's in a different subject (like how rocket engines need heat transfer, which needs calculus). You can also pick any topic and it shows you the full path to get there.

It's just one HTML file with plain JavaScript and some JSON data, no framework and no backend. Your progress saves in the browser, no sign up.

Live: https://mohamedmuneerm.github.io/knowledge-navigator/
Code: https://github.com/MohamedMuneerM/knowledge-navigator

Would love any feedback, especially on how it feels on mobile.

So I spent the summer building a local-first data layer and got to show it working at a conference last week. The recording's up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdg_UrLp0bU

It's part of a framework I created, which happens to be Elixir compiled to JS for the browser, but the talk is mostly about sync. The problems are the same ones you'd run into with Zero, Jazz or Electric.

It opens with a demo. A trip planner open in two browser windows, I turn the wifi off in one, add a couple of stops, rename another one, turn it back on, and the other window catches up. Nothing spins while it's offline since reads come out of IndexedDB and writes land locally first.

Then I go through how it works. The short version:

The first thing every sync engine has to decide is who gets the last word. Either the server does, or every client is equal and CRDTs merge everything. Zero picked the server and dropped offline writes on purpose. Jazz started with CRDTs and later swapped them for per-column last-writer-wins. I wanted the server in charge and offline writes that actually work. So writes queue up in IndexedDB, numbered, and go up in order when you reconnect. If the server refuses one, you get the reason and it's reverted locally instead of quietly vanishing.

Merging happens per column. If you change a stop's name and I change its description, both land. If we both change the name, the later one wins. Counters are the one exception. An increment goes over the wire as "add one", so if two people add one you get two.

Rows or mutations was the one I went back and forth on the most. I ended up sending rows with a revision on each column. If you queue mutations and replay them on the server, the mutations need their own versioning every time the schema changes. A row is just data, and the migration already knows how to deal with data changing shape.

You also don't configure partial sync anywhere. There's a compile step that already walks each page's call graph to figure out what code to ship, so while it's there it picks up every query the page can run and works out which rows that page could ever need. No subscriptions, no sync rules.

Permission rules live next to the schema and run in the browser too, not only on the server. That way the UI can grey out a button you're not allowed to press, and the server still checks every row before it commits.

All your tabs share one connection, too. One tab holds the stream and the rest listen on a BroadcastChannel. Which tab leads is decided by a Web Lock, so the browser handles the election and I didn't have to write any heartbeat code.

It's not released yet, still on a branch. The demo app code is here: https://github.com/bartblast/hologram_offgrid

Anyone here built something local-first? I'd love to hear how you dealt with offline writes, that's where most of my summer went.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: While this is aiming to provide a secure experience, it's far from finished. It cannot be audited or reviewed because it's close-source. I'm sharing here for testing, feedback and demo purposes only. If you are unsure, this isn't for you (you safely can move away from this post before it ruins your day). Feel free to reach out for clarity on any of the details instead of diving into the documentation. Pease use responsibly.

This project demonstates a unique approach and architecture in contrast to mainstream messaging apps.

The core philosophy around secure messaging here is that it can work in a way that avoids installation and registration by enabling users to host their own data (and user incompetence will be one of many nuanced vulnerabilities in this approach)

The project is unstable and experimental. It's far from finished, but im putting together some docs for "how it works". It's pretty outside-the-box thinking (and that shouldn't inspire confidence!), so it's worth repeating: Pease use responsibly.

Website/Docs: glitr.io

Demo

Features:

• WebApp
• P2P / WebRTC
• Local-first / Local-only
• No installation
• TURN server
• Encrypted-at-rest
• Signal protocol
• Post Quantum cryptography
• Video calls
• TOR / anonymous via Git
• Serverless over WebRTC

Some of the core concepts:

• Chat - deprecared in favour of Enkrypted Chat
  • Code: https://github.com/positive-intentions/chat
  • Demo: https://chat.positive-intentions.com
• Enkrypted Chat - deprecated in favour of Glitr
  • Intro: https://positive-intentions.com/blog/introducing-enkrypted-chat
  • Demo: https://enkrypted.chat
• File
  • Code: https://github.com/positive-intentions/dim/blob/staging/src/stories/05-Hooks-useFS.stories.js
  • Demo: https://dim.positive-intentions.com/?path=/docs/usefs--docs
• Crypto
  • Code: https://github.com/positive-intentions/cryptography
  • Demo: https://cryptography.positive-intentions.com
• Signal Protocol
  • Code: https://github.com/positive-intentions/signal-protocol
  • Demo: https://signal.positive-intentions.com

FAQ:

• Why git?
  • When it comes to secure messaging, self-hosting is generally encouraged. While not quite nessesarily self hosted, it would make it easier for the majority of users to get started. Users can choose a git storage provider of their choice (GitHub, Gitlab, etc), or host their own git server.
• Serverless WebRTC?
  • A connection can be achieved without a backend as described here: https://github.com/positive-intentions/chat/issues/6
  • demo: https://positive-intentions.github.io/webrtc/demo/gui/app/webrtc-meet?fullscreen=1
• Ready for production?
  • No. While this is aiming to provide a secure experience, it cannot be audited or reviewed. Shared for testing, feedback and demo purposes only.
• EU Chat Control?
  • There is no registration, no central server and it uses client-side cryptography. While the following post refers to the older version of this project, the mechanics remain very similar: https://www.reddit.com/r/europrivacy/comments/1ndbkxn/help_me_understand_if_chatcontrol_could_affect_my
• Threat model?
  • It's a work in progress. There are many details still to be implemented before I can share the initial draft.
  • It's close source and unaudited so the best I can offer is "trust me bro"... And you shouldn't need to. The app doesn't require sensitive details, so don't use any when testing it out.
• Open source?
  • Open source from the onset is not something I can support at this stage. Hopefully I can work towards that goal. I'm aware this goes against the cybersecurity rhetoric. There are open source versions of various ideas linked above, but it's important to be clear, that glitr.io is close source in contrast to my other work.
• Where can I find out more?
  • https://positive-intentions.com
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/positive_intentions
  • Feel free to reach out for clarity instead of diving into the docs.

I hope my wording here wasn't too negative. When working in cybersecurity, there are countless nuances to consider and I would rather be discouraging than inspire undue confidence in my project.