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Placeholder text is necessary scaffolding in web development, but ubiquitous Lorem ipsum can lead to design monotony and disconnect from project context. Developers building mockups, prototypes, or content-heavy interfaces often need filler text that matches the tone of the target application without introducing distracting Latin. What it is The Lorem Ipsum Generator is a browser-based tool that produces placeholder text in multiple styles, moving beyond classical Latin pseudo-text. It offers distinct variants: traditional Lorem ipsum, Hipster Ipsum with artisanal terminology, Corporate Speak filled with business jargon, and Pirate Ipsum with nautical themes. Each style maintains readability while providing vocabulary that aligns with the spirit of a given project. The generator is part of DevTools, a privacy-first collection of 200+ free browser tools where all processing happens locally—no signup, no tracking. Developers can configure generation parameters to specify the number of paragraphs, total word count, and whether to start with the familiar “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet” opening. The output is plain text ready for pasting into HTML, design files, or CMS entries. How to use it The interface is a straightforward form: select a text style from the dropdown, then set the number of paragraphs or words you need. The tool generates the text instantly and provides a one-click copy button. <!-- Example output structure when pasting into HTML --> <div class= "content-area" > <p> Leverage agile frameworks to provide a robust synopsis for high level overviews... </p> <p> Iterative approaches to corporate strategy foster collaborative thinking... </p> </div> For typical workflows, 1–3 paragraphs suffice for article previews or body content. Headlines work well with 5–15 words, while navigation elements often need only 2–5 words. The quick copy functionality streamlines populating multiple content areas. Different styles suit different contexts: Corporate Speak makes busi

Por muito tempo eu acreditei que programação e desenvolvimento de software como sinônimos. Na...

A few months ago I was demoing my RAG-powered support bot to a colleague, feeling pretty confident about it. Then it confidently told her our refund policy was “30 days, no questions asked.” Our actual policy is 14 days, with conditions. The bot didn’t hedge. It didn’t say “I’m not sure.” It just made it up and said it with the same calm tone it uses for everything else. That demo stung. RAG was supposed to fix hallucinations, not just relocate them. Here’s what I learned debugging it, roughly in the order I learned it. 1. My chunks were too big, and too dumb I was splitting documents by character count, 1000 chars with slight overlap. It felt efficient. It wasn’t. A single chunk often contained unrelated sections. For example, the end of a “Shipping Policy” and the start of a “Returns Policy” could sit together in the same block. So when the retriever saw a query about returns, it would grab that chunk and the model would blend both sections into one confident but wrong answer. Fix: I switched to semantic chunking based on headings and paragraphs instead of raw character limits. More work upfront, but it stopped feeding the model Frankenstein context. 2. I trusted top-k similarity way too much My retriever was pulling the top 3 chunks by cosine similarity and passing them straight into the prompt. The problem: “similar” is not the same as “relevant.” A chunk can be semantically close to the query but still not actually contain the answer. The model doesn’t know that, it just assumes everything in context is true. Fix: I added a reranking step using a cross-encoder and started logging retrieval scores properly. That alone made it obvious when the system had no real answer but was still trying to act confident. 3. I never told the model it was allowed to say “I don’t know” My prompt was basically: “Use the context to answer the question.” That’s it. No instruction on what to do when the context is insufficient. So the model did what LLMs do when under-specified: it f

Software has become the backbone of modern business operations, powering everything from customer-facing applications and e-commerce platforms to enterprise systems and cloud-based services. Behind every successful software product is a well-structured development process designed to ensure quality, scalability, security, and long-term maintainability. The Software Development Process, commonly referred to as the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), provides a systematic framework for transforming ideas into reliable software solutions. By following a defined methodology, organizations can reduce risks, optimize resources, improve collaboration, and deliver products that align with business objectives. This article explores the key stages of the software development process and highlights why each phase is essential to successful project delivery. What Is the Software Development Process? The software development process is a structured sequence of activities involved in designing, building, testing, deploying, and maintaining software applications. It serves as a roadmap that guides development teams from initial requirements gathering to ongoing support after deployment. A well-defined development process helps organizations: Improve project predictability and delivery timelines Reduce development and maintenance costs Enhance software quality and reliability Strengthen security and compliance Increase customer satisfaction Facilitate collaboration across teams Whether developing a small business application or a large-scale enterprise platform, a structured process is critical for achieving sustainable success. _ Phase 1: Requirements Gathering and Analysis_ Every successful software project begins with a clear understanding of business needs and user expectations. During this phase, stakeholders, business analysts, project managers, and development teams collaborate to identify: Business objectives Functional requirements Non-functional requirements User expe

Chrome has had scroll restoration support since 2015. You can even control it: history.scrollRestoration = 'manual' . But if you've ever tried to reliably restore a user's position on a React or Next.js app, you know it doesn't work the way you'd expect. Here's what breaks, why it breaks, and how a browser extension can sidestep the entire problem. What the Browser Actually Does The default behavior is history.scrollRestoration = 'auto' . When you navigate back to a page, the browser tries to scroll to where you were. This works fine for static pages. It falls apart for: SPAs where content is injected into the DOM after navigation Infinite scroll pages where the content at a given Y position changes depending on what was previously loaded Lazy-loaded images that push content down after the scroll restore fires The fundamental problem: the browser fires scroll restoration when the page HTML is parsed, not when the page content is fully rendered. A React app that loads a skeleton → fetches data → renders actual content will restore scroll into a partially-rendered DOM. The history.scrollRestoration = 'manual' Trap If you set manual , you own scroll restoration completely. Most Next.js apps do this. The typical approach: // Save position before navigation router . beforeEach (( to , from ) => { savedPositions [ from . path ] = window . scrollY ; }); // Restore after navigation router . afterEach (( to ) => { const position = savedPositions [ to . path ]; if ( position !== undefined ) { nextTick (() => window . scrollTo ( 0 , position )); } }); The nextTick is the problem. It fires after the Vue/React render cycle, but before async data fetching completes. The page renders empty containers, scroll restores to Y=800, then data loads and pushes everything down. User ends up at Y=800 in a now-different page position. The correct fix is to wait until the content that was at Y=800 actually exists. There's no clean hook for this — you'd need to observe the DOM until the expec

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam I've been in online queer communities for a long time, and one thing that's always stood out is the endearing obsession with pop culture. The artists, the music, the fashion, the references. Every form of art gets appreciated, deeply analyzed, and celebrated. Diva Academy is an attempt to reflect that energy and honor Pride month and the pop culture that comes with it. What I Built Diva Academy is a pop culture trivia adventure. You play as a fresh face entering a campus where the currency is knowledge. The questions cover everything from ballroom culture and drag history to Beyoncé's discography and the origins of the Pride flag. The game runs in sessions: NPCs challenge you to timed trivia battles. Reach your REP(utation) goal to win, or hit zero and you're out. Earned REP converts to permanent currency between sessions, making it a rogue-lite-lite-lite experience where you gradually get stronger even when you lose. The game is built with vanilla HTML5 Canvas, CSS, and JavaScript. It features: 6 explorable rooms 4 NPC tiers - Starlet , Diva , DJ , and Mother - each with distinct personalities and increasing difficulty A rival system where a recurring NPC named Vex Vivienne spawns across the map and hunts you down A permanent perk system where REP earned in each run converts to permanent currency for buying perks like Grace (forgive one wrong answer), Clutch (survive at 0 REP once), and Haste (extra time on the timer) A Spotlight mechanic - defeat a Diva-tier or higher NPC and you earn a one-time 1.5x REP buff for your next face-off Two minigames - Hangman (guess the pop star name) and Pop Connect (link two artists through a mathematically perfect, AI-grounded collaboration graph with look-ahead validation) The Turing Challenge - Archivist Alan tests your ability to distinguish real pop culture quotes from AI-generated fabrications A customization system that unlocks new dress and hair colors as you defeat NPCs An

I did not choose DeepSeek because I think GPT-4 is bad. I chose it because I was building a free app, and free apps teach you what actually matters pretty fast. The question was simple: how do I keep sessions cheap enough that people can practice a lot without me lighting money on fire? The answer pushed me toward DeepSeek-V3 (and later R1 for specific tasks). The real constraint was volume The app is a conversation practice tool. People come in to rehearse hard talks, not to admire the model. A single practice session runs 8-15 turns. Each turn is roughly 300-600 tokens in, 100-300 out. Multiply that by five sessions a week per active user and the costs start compounding. Here is what the math looked like when I was choosing (mid-2026 pricing): Model Input cost (per 1M tokens) Output cost (per 1M tokens) Cost per 10-turn session (est.) GPT-4o $2.50 $10.00 ~$0.04-0.06 GPT-4 Turbo $10.00 $30.00 ~$0.12-0.18 DeepSeek-V3 $0.27 $1.10 ~$0.004-0.007 DeepSeek-R1 $0.55 $2.19 ~$0.008-0.012 At scale, the difference between $0.005 and $0.05 per session is the difference between running a free product and needing a paywall after three conversations. I wanted people to come back daily without hitting a wall. What DeepSeek handled well It stayed in character for 10-15 turns. It pushed back when the user got vague. It followed persona heuristics (numbered if/then rules in the system prompt) about as reliably as GPT-4o did for our use case. For salary negotiation rehearsal, the model needs to say "that's not in the budget" and hold that position for three more turns while the user tries different approaches. DeepSeek-V3 did this. Not perfectly, but reliably enough that sessions felt real. It also made the app easier to run as a free product. People can try, fail, reset, and try again without me worrying about per-session cost. Where GPT-4 was still better GPT-4 (and 4o) is smoother with nuanced emotional wording. When a conversation gets subtle, loaded with subtext, or requires pick

Debugging authentication in web apps is painful. You need to test the same flow as five different user types — new visitor, returning user, admin, expired session, logged-out — and the easiest way is to constantly create new accounts or clear all your cookies and start over. There's a faster way. These five techniques use direct cookie manipulation to simulate any auth state without touching your database or creating dummy accounts. I use CookieJar for most of this — a free Chrome extension built natively on MV3 that gives you a proper UI for cookie editing. But I'll show you the underlying Chrome DevTools method too, so you understand what's actually happening. 1. Simulate a Logged-Out State Without Clearing Everything The naive approach: clear all cookies and reload. The problem: you just nuked your dev server session token, your local storage flags, your Stripe test mode cookie, and everything else you carefully set up. The targeted approach : identify and delete only the session/auth cookie. Most session cookies are named session , sid , auth_token , _session_id , or something close. In DevTools: Application → Cookies → [your domain] → find the session cookie → right-click → Delete With CookieJar: open the extension, search session , click the trash icon next to just that cookie. Your dev environment stays intact. The user state resets to logged-out. 2. Test the "Returning User" vs "New User" Path Without a Second Account Session cookies tell the server you're authenticated. But many apps use separate cookies to track whether a user has seen the onboarding flow, completed setup, or visited before. Look for cookies like onboarding_complete , setup_done , first_visit , or custom flags in your app code. To test the new user experience: Export your current cookies (CookieJar → Export → JSON format, or copy from DevTools) Delete the specific onboarding/first-visit flag cookie Reload and test the new user path Re-import or re-set the cookie to restore your state This

Over the past year, I've noticed something interesting in conversations about enterprise AI. Most...

TL;DR: I built a .NET library that renders Helm charts and drives Kubernetes releases without shelling out to the helm CLI. 129/129 templates across ingress-nginx, cert-manager, external-dns, podinfo, and metrics-server now render successfully. The main entry point is HelmSharp.Action, with lower-level packages available for chart loading, rendering, Kubernetes operations, and release storage. MIT licensed, looking for feedback and early adopters. Why I Built This At work, our .NET services deploy to Kubernetes through Helm. Every Docker image had to bundle the helm binary — another dependency to manage, another layer in the image, another surface for CVEs. I wanted to cut that out entirely and do Helm-style rendering directly in-process. The .NET ecosystem doesn't really have this. There are YAML libraries. There are Kubernetes client libraries. There are template engines. But nothing ties them together the way helm template does — values merging, named templates, include , range , toYaml , the whole Sprig function set, all wired into a single render pipeline. So I started building one. (This is also my first real open source project — I'd spent years consuming OSS without contributing back, and HelmSharp is what came out of deciding to change that.) What HelmSharp Does HelmSharp is a multi-package .NET SDK (net8.0 / net9.0 / net10.0) that covers: Package What it does HelmSharp.Action High-level Helm client — TemplateAsync , UpgradeInstallAsync , RollbackAsync HelmSharp.Chart Chart loading from directories and .tgz , values merging, --set / --set-json style overrides HelmSharp.Engine Helm-style template rendering — 100+ Sprig/Helm functions HelmSharp.Kube Kubernetes apply, delete, and wait (no kubectl needed) HelmSharp.Release Release history stored in Kubernetes Secrets (Helm-compatible) HelmSharp.Repo Chart repository index, pull, and search Plus Registry , Storage , PostRenderer extension points Here's the lower-level rendering API — no result objects, no stdout

Let me confess something a little creepy. I have a habit of peeking at other people's dev posts. Not stealing the writing — relax. I run a tiny read-only job that fetches the public pages on dev.to, Zenn, and Qiita and counts only the boring parts: titles, post times, like counts. Who published what, at what hour, and how far it traveled. Then it tallies the lot. The reason is petty: my own posts weren't landing. The content is already in my hands — so I wanted to know how much the rest, the when and how you publish , actually moves the needle. By the numbers, not by gut. So I counted across three platforms. And the conditions that make a post fly turned out to be roughly mirror images between Japan (Zenn / Qiita) and the English-speaking world (dev.to). Here's the story. First, my most important disclaimer This post is full of numbers, so let me put up a guardrail before any of them. This is correlation, not causation . A result like "weekend posts don't do well" could mean the weekend itself is bad — or it could mean people who post on weekends are just dashing something off on the side. The data can't separate those. Please read it that way. Also, I only keep aggregate numbers I computed myself . I don't store or reuse anyone's article body (read-only GET, count the features, throw the page away). I peek, but only at the overall shape . Nobody gets singled out here. With that out of the way — four findings I enjoyed. 1. The best hour to publish is just your readers' time zone This one came out cleanest. On Qiita , posts published in the morning win (+32pt in the GOOD group). Midday is +14pt. Evening is -32pt, late night -14pt. Zenn likes midday too (+27pt). Late night is -15pt. dev.to is the exact opposite. Late night Japan time scores +7pt — Japanese evening is actually weak. The trick is obvious once you see it. dev.to's readers are English-speaking, mostly US. Late night in Japan is the US working day. Zenn and Qiita readers are in Japan, so the Japanese morni

I run a paid infrastructure service. Alone. No co-founder, no on-call rotation, no senior engineer to escalate to. My only collaborator is Claude Code, and after about a year, my persistent memory has grown to 60+ entries. Those entries have become more valuable than any runbook I've written. They've also taught me — painfully — what makes memory architecture work and what makes it quietly fail. If you're running anything solo with an AI agent, here are five lessons I wish I'd burned into my brain on day one. 1. Write the why , not the what The first instinct when you start using persistent memory is to log what you did. "Migrated service X from tool A to tool B." "Switched protocol from X to Y." Six months later, when something breaks, that information is worthless . You don't need to know what you did — git log and git blame already tell you that. You need to know why you made that choice. What constraint forced it. What you ruled out. Real example. The bad version of an entry I once wrote: Switched the worker pool from Docker containers to systemd units on host. Tells me nothing my git history doesn't. The rewritten version: systemd units on the host instead of Docker containers on this VPS provider. Why: the provider runs aggressive kernel-wide OOM scoring across tenants; containers were getting reaped by oom-killer triggered by other customers' workloads. systemd processes survive because they're scored as system processes. How to apply: any VPS where dmesg | grep -i oom shows kills from PIDs you don't recognize — don't run containers there, run systemd. That one entry has saved me three rebuilds. Because the next time I'm tempted to "just dockerize it, it'll be cleaner," the memory entry says: no, you already learned this, you'll be back here in a week. The pattern: always include Why: and How to apply: lines. If a memory entry can't answer those two questions, delete it. 2. Memory rots — prune or pay About six months in, I did a memory audit. Of 60 entries, 1

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam Archive — The Last Historian of Humanity What if history wasn't discovered... but selected? History is often treated as something permanent—something waiting to be uncovered. Archive asks a different question: What happens when humanity loses the ability to tell the difference between truth, memory, and fabrication? You play as the final Archivist after the collapse of civilization. Humanity's knowledge survives, but it has become fragmented, contradictory, and corrupted. Your responsibility is no longer to preserve everything—you must decide what deserves to be remembered. Every decision changes the civilization that will inherit your version of history. What I Built Archive is a narrative investigation game where players reconstruct humanity's past by examining historical memories, investigating evidence, resolving contradictions, and deciding what becomes official history. Unlike traditional mystery games, there is rarely a perfect answer. Instead, every investigation asks questions such as: Should conflicting memories be preserved? Is stability more important than truth? Can compassion justify rewriting history? If no one can verify the past, what does "truth" even mean? Each recovered memory is presented as a historical article. Players investigate through classified documents, research papers, witness testimonies, forensic reports, personal journals, and government archives before making irreversible decisions. Those decisions reshape the civilization that follows. By the end of the game, players don't simply receive a score—they discover the kind of society they created. Why It Fits the Theme The June Solstice represents a turning point. It is the moment when one season gives way to another, when light begins yielding to darkness, or darkness begins yielding to light. Archive explores a similar transition. Not between seasons... but between certainty and uncertainty. Human civilization reaches a moment where

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam Link to Game Home Page - here Link to Game Docs - here What I Built Heliograph is a short 2D solar-noir platformer. You are a courier who wakes with no memory on the summer solstice , the longest day of the year — the one day the sun is supposed to never quite die. A cracked handheld computer flickers on in your hand and tells you the truth: tonight the sun will set, and a relay station full of light has one unfinished message left to send before the dark. Sunlight is your battery and your map — it refills your light cell and reveals the route. Shadow hides you from the station's machines, but it slowly drains you, so you can never simply wait. Every screen is a negotiation between expose, charge, traverse, hide, decode. The core puzzle is a light relay . Most of the station is dark. Standing in a live sunbeam, you trip a relay that throws the light forward — a beam snaps to the next aperture, that beam comes alive, its cipher glyph becomes readable, and the chain continues until the final relay powers the exit terminal. You are literally carrying the light deeper into the ruin one beam at a time. Skip a relay and the road ahead stays dark and unsolvable. The jam theme is the solstice — light and darkness, and the passage of time. Heliograph is built entirely out of that tension: Light vs. darkness is the core mechanic, not a backdrop. Light is power, information, and danger at once; shadow is safety that costs you. The passage of time is the antagonist. The whole game is one long solstice day bleeding into night, and the message has to leave the station before dark. The station is a heliograph — a real Victorian device that sent Morse code by flashing sunlight off mirrors. Light is the message. There are no cutscene dumps. ACE, your handheld guide, narrates the opening, and after you decode each level's keyword — SUN → ARC → LUX → RAY — ACE decrypts one more fragment of the truth: why you're here, that you may not

Hi 👋 fellow devs Sorry for such a big gap since my last article...... Life got a bit hectic, but I am finally back in action! You know how it goes. We spend so much of our energy obsessing over the flashy side of tech. We talk about gorgeous UI designs, smooth animations, and whatever frontend framework is trending on GitHub this week. But let’s be completely real for a second. What actually keeps your favorite apps from melting down when millions of people hit the refresh button at the exact same moment? That is exactly what we are going to unpack today. We are pulling back the curtain on the quiet, brilliant backstage crew of infrastructure tools. You see their logos all over tech Twitter and hear senior engineers drop their names in meetings like secret handshakes, but today, we are stripping away the corporate fluff. We will break down eight legendary backend technologies using conversational paragraphs and quick bullet points so you can finally master what they actually do. Let’s dive right in. 1. Redis Traditional databases live on hard drives. They are fantastic for keeping your data safe and organized permanently, but pulling data off a physical drive takes time. If your application has to wander deep into those database aisles to fetch the exact same piece of information every single second, your entire system starts to stall. To understand how Redis fixes this, imagine you are studying for a brutal exam. Your massive, 1,000-page textbook represents your main database. It holds every single answer, but flipping through the pages continuously is incredibly slow. Redis is the digital equivalent of writing the core formulas you need on a neon sticky note and taping it directly to your monitor. It keeps critical data sitting directly inside the system's lightning-fast short-term memory. You will typically find Redis stepping in to handle operations like: Session Management: Keeping users logged into an application without checking the main database on every cli

Every developer I know has the same problem: knowledge scattered across five places at once. Browser bookmarks they never re-read. Notion docs that become graveyards. Slack threads with critical context that disappear into the archive. README files that contradict each other. Stack Overflow answers bookmarked with zero recall of why. I tried most of the "second brain" setups and none of them stuck until I figured out why they kept failing: generic productivity systems are not built for how developers actually think and work. A developer's knowledge is fundamentally different from a writer's or a manager's. It is: Code-linked (a note about a library is useless without the actual code it explains) Decision-heavy (architecture decisions need context, rationale, and alternatives considered) Debugging-intensive (solutions to bugs need the exact error message, environment, and what you tried) Time-sensitive (that API migration note is only relevant for a 3-month window) Here is the structure that actually worked. The Core Structure 00-Inbox/ 10-Projects/ 20-Areas/ - Language: Python/ - Stack: AWS/ - Domain: Auth/ 30-Resources/ - Libraries/ - Tools/ - Patterns/ 40-Archive/ The key insight: Resources are evergreen, Projects are temporary, Areas are ongoing responsibilities. A note about how JWT works lives in 30-Resources/Domain-Auth/ . A note about implementing JWT for the current sprint lives in 10-Projects/Sprint-42-Auth-Revamp/ . When the sprint is done, the project gets archived. The JWT fundamentals note stays forever. The Templates That Made It Click Architecture Decision Record (ADR) # ADR-042: Use Postgres over DynamoDB for user sessions Status: Accepted | Date: 2026-06-22 ## Context We need session storage that supports complex queries for the audit log feature. ## Decision Postgres with connection pooling via PgBouncer. ## Alternatives Considered - DynamoDB: rejected (query limitations for audit log requirements) - Redis: rejected (not durable enough for complian

1. Introduction Django's ORM is one of its greatest strengths. It abstracts away raw SQL, lets you express database operations in clean Python, and gets you productive fast. But that convenience comes with a hidden cost: if you're not deliberate about how you fetch related objects, you'll silently generate far more queries than you intend — and you won't notice until your app slows to a crawl in production. The most common culprit is the N+1 query problem : a pattern where fetching a list of N objects triggers an additional query for each one, resulting in N+1 total round-trips to the database. At ten rows it's invisible. At ten thousand rows, it's a disaster. Django provides two tools to fix this: select_related and prefetch_related . This article explains how each one works internally, when to use which, and how to combine them effectively — with before/after examples and real query counts throughout. 2. Understanding the N+1 Problem Consider a simple blog with posts and authors. You want to render a list of posts, showing each post's title and its author's name. Models: # models.py from django.db import models class Author ( models . Model ): name : str = models . CharField ( max_length = 100 ) class Post ( models . Model ): title : " str = models.CharField(max_length=200) " author : Author = models . ForeignKey ( Author , on_delete = models . CASCADE , related_name = " posts " , ) The naive approach: # views.py from django.db import connection from .models import Post def list_posts () -> None : posts = Post . objects . all () # Query 1: fetch all posts for post in posts : print ( f " { post . title } by { post . author . name } " ) # ^^^ Query 2, 3, 4, ... N+1: one per post For 100 posts, this produces 101 queries . Django lazily fetches post.author the first time you access it on each object. Each access hits the database separately. You can verify this with django.db.connection.queries (requires DEBUG = True ): from django.db import connection , reset_queries

Hey DEV community! 👋 How many times a day do you need to format a messy JSON string, convert a CSV file, or parse a timestamp? And how many times do you find yourself pasting that data—which might contain API keys, user emails, or proprietary code—into a random website you found on Google? We’ve all done it, but in an era of constant data leaks, it’s a massive security risk. That’s exactly why I built Parsify . What is Parsify? Parsify is an all-in-one data converter and developer toolset designed to handle your daily formatting, parsing, and data manipulation tasks completely offline and client-side. No servers, no tracking, and absolutely no data leaks. Everything happens right inside your browser sandbox. 🚀 Key Features 100% Secure & Offline: Your data never leaves your local machine. Once the page loads, you can literally pull your internet plug and it will still work perfectly. All-in-One Toolkit: No more bookmarking ten different sites for ten different tasks. From JSON formatting and base64 encoding to data conversions, it’s all under one roof. Built for Speed: A clean, lightning-fast UI with batch-processing support to keep your workflow uninterrupted. Privacy by Design: Zero tracking scripts, zero ads, and zero database logging. Why I Built It Most online utilities are bloated with tracking pixels, pop-up ads, and cookies. Worse, you have no idea what happens to the data you paste into their input fields. As a developer, I wanted a tool that felt like a local desktop app but possessed the accessibility of a web app. Parsify is the bridge. It gives you the convenience of a web utility with the strict security boundaries of local execution. Check It Out (It's Free!) If you’re tired of compromising on data privacy for quick utilities, give it a spin: 👉 parsify.tools I’m actively working on adding more tools and converters to the suite. I would absolutely love to get the DEV community's feedback! What converters or formatting utilities do you use daily that you

Contacts are messier than they look. A user's real address book is spread across the people they've saved by hand, the people they've emailed often enough that the provider auto-collected them, and the colleagues in their company directory. Google exposes these through the People API; Microsoft through Graph; both model the data differently and split it across sources you have to query separately. The Nylas Contacts API unifies all of that behind one schema and one grant_id . You read saved contacts, auto-collected contacts, and directory contacts through the same endpoint, create and update entries that sync back to the provider, and organize them into groups. This post walks the contact surface from the HTTP API and the Nylas CLI , which mirrors every operation for terminal use. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are the ones I run when I'm exploring an address book. The contact model and its three sources A contact in Nylas carries the fields you'd expect — given_name , surname , emails , phone_numbers , company_name , job_title , notes — plus richer ones like im_addresses , physical_addresses , and web_pages . The schema is the same across providers, so a Google contact and a Microsoft contact deserialize into one struct. The detail that trips people up is source . Every contact has one of three sources, and they mean very different things: address_book — contacts the user saved deliberately. This is the real address book. inbox — contacts the provider auto-collected because the user emailed them. These were never explicitly saved. domain — contacts from the organization's directory (coworkers). Knowing the source matters because "all contacts" usually isn't what you want. If you're building a contact picker, the inbox source can flood it with one-off recipients the user doesn't think of as contacts. Filter by source deliberately. See the Contacts API overview for the full data model. Before you begin You need a Nylas API key and a connected accou

Meeting notes are the feature everyone wants and nobody wants to build. The hard part isn't the summary — an LLM handles that. The hard part is getting into the meeting: a bot that joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, survives each platform's waiting room and admission flow, records cleanly, and produces a transcript you can feed downstream. Each provider has its own join mechanics, and none of them ships a tidy "record this meeting" API. The Nylas Notetaker API is that bot as a service. You point it at a meeting link, it joins on schedule, records, and generates a transcript, and you fetch the recording and transcript through one endpoint. This post walks the Notetaker surface from the HTTP API and the Nylas CLI , which mirrors the whole lifecycle for terminal use and quick testing. I work on the CLI, so the terminal commands below are exactly what I run when I'm testing a notetaker against a live meeting. Two ways to run a notetaker: grant-scoped or standalone Before any code, there's one architectural choice worth understanding, because it changes the endpoint you call. A grant-scoped notetaker is tied to a connected account and lives under /v3/grants/{grant_id}/notetakers . Use it when the bot acts on behalf of a specific user — it can read that user's calendar and join their meetings as them. A standalone notetaker has no grant at all and lives under /v3/notetakers . You hand it a raw meeting link and it joins, no connected account required. This is the one to reach for when you just have a URL and want a recording — a public webinar, a meeting on an account you haven't connected, or a system that deals in links rather than users. Same request body, same lifecycle, same media output; the only difference is whether there's a grant_id in the path. See the Notetaker overview for how both models fit together. Before you begin You need a Nylas API key. If you're using a grant-scoped notetaker you also need a connected account; for standalone, the API key al