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Anyone working with several projects and an AI assistant knows the problem: in every repo you explain anew how you name things, what the layer architecture looks like, why you deliberately don't use this one library. The decisions were made long ago. But they live in your head, scattered across repos, and the assistant only ever knows the slice it currently sees. So I started putting that knowledge in one place where both I and Claude can find it. Why Outline – and why self-hosted The choice fell on Outline , self-hosted on its own subdomain. Three reasons tipped the scales. First: I want to keep my data with me and not depend on a vendor. A knowledge store that all my decisions flow into over the years is exactly the kind of asset you don't want in someone else's hands. Second: full data export, any time. If I want to move to a different system tomorrow, I take everything with me. No lock-in. Third: self-hosting opens up better options later – for instance my own RAG, should I ever want to go deeper into searching across my own body of knowledge. I don't need it right now. But the door is open, and that's worth the effort. The cookbook – the heart of it Separate from the individual projects sits its own collection: the cookbook. Cross-project, generic, and that's exactly what makes it valuable. This is where it says how I build, regardless of which product I'm sitting at right now. Roughly, it's split into a few areas: Conventions – naming, code style, docblocks, git commits, markdown, package manager, writing style. The boring but decisive things you'd otherwise re-discuss three times per project. Backend – layer architecture, a unified API error format, test strategy, migrations and indexes, i18n, async jobs and idempotency. Frontend / mobile – feature-first architecture ( core/ , shared/ , features/ ), design system, forms, networking, state, routing, storage, styling, testing. Deployment – my standard setup with Caddy as the edge and a Hetzner VPS. Templates –

Tóm tắt Nếu thay đổi gói miễn phí của Postman khiến bạn mất quyền truy cập vào workspace được chia sẻ, dữ liệu của bạn chưa chắc đã bị xóa. Việc cần làm là phục hồi càng sớm càng tốt trước khi cache cục bộ, quyền API hoặc bản sao lưu còn sót lại không còn dùng được. Bài viết này hướng dẫn các cách lấy lại collection/environment từ Postman và nhập chúng sang Apidog để giảm rủi ro bị khóa dữ liệu trong tương lai. Dùng thử Apidog ngay hôm nay Bối cảnh Sau bản cập nhật gói miễn phí Quý 1 năm 2026 của Postman, nhiều developer dùng workspace chia sẻ với đồng nghiệp phát hiện rằng họ không còn truy cập được dữ liệu nhóm. Các collection nằm trong workspace team, thay vì workspace cá nhân, đột nhiên bị khóa sau paywall. Một developer mô tả trên Reddit: “Tôi đến làm việc vào thứ Hai và toàn bộ không gian làm việc của nhóm tôi đã biến mất. Ba tháng với các bộ sưu tập, môi trường được sắp xếp gọn gàng, tất cả đều biến mất. Chỉ còn cách trả tiền thì mới có lại.” Điểm quan trọng: dữ liệu thường không bị xóa ngay. Postman lưu dữ liệu workspace phía server, còn việc bạn không nhìn thấy collection là hạn chế quyền truy cập. Vì vậy, hãy xử lý theo thứ tự dưới đây, ưu tiên các nguồn có khả năng còn dữ liệu đầy đủ nhất. 1. Kiểm tra cache trong ứng dụng Postman desktop Trước tiên, mở Postman desktop app nếu bạn đã từng dùng nó. Không mở bản web tại app.getpostman.com . Ứng dụng desktop có thể còn cache cục bộ của collection và environment bạn truy cập gần đây. Cache này thường chỉ tồn tại trong thời gian ngắn, tùy hệ thống và cơ chế invalidation của Postman, nên hãy xuất dữ liệu ngay nếu còn nhìn thấy. Các bước thực hiện: Mở Postman desktop. Kiểm tra tab History để xem các request gần đây. Kiểm tra sidebar bên trái xem collection còn hiển thị không. Nếu collection còn hiển thị, xuất ngay từng collection. Cách export collection: Nhấp chuột phải vào collection hoặc bấm menu ba chấm. Chọn Export . Chọn định dạng Collection v2.1 . Lưu file .json ra thư mục an toàn. Nếu collection vẫn hiển t

TL;DR If Postman’s 2026 Q1 free plan change blocked access to shared collections, your data may still be recoverable. Start with your Postman desktop cache, then check exports, admins, the Postman API, and logs. Once you recover the JSON files, import them into Apidog so your team has a safer workflow going forward. Try Apidog today Introduction After Postman’s 2026 Q1 free tier update, many developers found that shared workspaces were no longer accessible on the free plan. Collections that lived in team workspaces, instead of personal workspaces, became locked behind a paid plan. One developer described it on Reddit: “I came in on Monday and my whole team workspace was gone. Three months of organized collections, environments, all of it. Just gone unless we pay.” In most cases, the data is not immediately deleted. Postman stores workspace data server-side, and the issue is usually access restriction rather than deletion. That said, recovery is time-sensitive because local cache, API access, and workspace availability may not last. Use the steps below in order. 1. Check the Postman desktop app cache first Start with the Postman desktop app, not the web app. The desktop app may still have cached copies of recently opened collections and environments. Even if your server-side access is revoked, the local cache can sometimes keep enough data available to export. Steps Open the Postman desktop app. Do not use the web app at app.getpostman.com . Check the left sidebar for your collections. Open the History tab to confirm which endpoints you recently used. If collections are visible, export them immediately. To export a collection: Right-click the collection or open the three-dot menu. Select Export . Choose Collection v2.1 . Save the file locally. Repeat for every visible collection. If the collection appears but export fails, try working offline: Click your avatar in the top-right corner. Select Go Offline . Retry the export. Going offline can prevent the app from refre

Em resumo Variáveis definidas em scripts do Postman podem “sumir” quando você troca a execução manual pelo Collection Runner. Na prática, quase sempre é um problema de escopo: pm.environment.set escreve no ambiente ativo, variáveis de coleção têm outro ciclo de vida, e o runner pode descartar alterações ao final da execução. Experimente o Apidog hoje Neste guia, você vai ver como diagnosticar o problema, escolher o escopo correto e corrigir os casos mais comuns. Também verá como o Apidog lida com variáveis de forma mais explícita na interface. Introdução Você testa uma API manualmente no Postman: Executa a requisição de login. Um script salva o token. As próximas requisições usam {{token}} . Tudo funciona. Depois você clica em Run Collection . O login retorna sucesso, mas a próxima requisição falha com 401 Unauthorized . O token não foi encontrado. Esse comportamento é comum porque o modo manual e o Collection Runner não lidam com o estado das variáveis exatamente da mesma forma. A correção começa entendendo a hierarquia de escopos do Postman. Hierarquia de escopo de variáveis do Postman O Postman resolve variáveis seguindo uma ordem de prioridade. Da maior para a menor: Variáveis locais : existem apenas durante a execução do script atual. Variáveis de dados : vêm de arquivos CSV ou JSON usados em execuções orientadas por dados. Variáveis de coleção : pertencem à coleção e podem ser usadas por requisições dentro dela. Variáveis de ambiente : pertencem ao ambiente selecionado. Variáveis globais : ficam disponíveis para qualquer coleção e ambiente. Quando você usa: {{token}} o Postman procura token nessa ordem e usa o primeiro valor encontrado. Isso significa que o problema nem sempre é “a variável não existe”. Às vezes ela existe, mas em outro escopo, ou um escopo de maior prioridade está sobrescrevendo o valor esperado. Por que as variáveis desaparecem no Collection Runner 1. Valor inicial vs. valor atual Cada variável no Postman pode ter dois valores: Valor inicial

NVIDIA's cuda-python , the official Python bindings for the CUDA toolkit, recently added automatically-generated .pyi stub files using stubgen-pyx . Their description of why: "This allows IDE auto-completion to work (which is also used by IDE-integrated coding agents). This has also found 2 real bugs in our code already. The ability to catch a certain class of bugs with this will be really helpful going forward, especially since our linting abilities with cython-lint are a bit behind what they are in pure Python." When you commit .pyi stubs alongside a Cython extension, you get an artifact your normal Python linting and type-checking pipeline can analyze. Inconsistencies between what the Cython source does and what the stub claims become visible. NVIDIA found two real bugs this way before they were reported. I'm the author of stubgen-pyx, and this post is a technical walk-through of how those stubs are produced. The problem with existing stub generators When you compile a Cython module, the source disappears. What you get is a .so (or .pyd ) file: a compiled extension with no type information readable by a language server. Tools like mypy's stubgen can generate stubs for these by importing the compiled binary and using runtime introspection. The results are usually disappointing. Take this typed Cython module: """ Mathematical utilities for scientific computing. """ cdef class Matrix : """ A simple matrix class. """ cdef int rows cdef int cols def __init__ ( self , int rows , int cols ): """ Initialize a matrix. """ self . rows = rows self . cols = cols def shape ( self ) -> tuple [ int , int ]: """ Get matrix dimensions. """ return ( self . rows , self . cols ) cpdef scale ( self , double factor ): """ Scale all elements. """ pass cdef int _validate ( self ): """ Internal validation (not exposed). """ return 0 def matrix_product ( Matrix a , Matrix b ) -> Matrix : """ Compute matrix product. """ return Matrix ( a . rows , b . cols ) Running stubgen on the compiled

Been doing a lot of competitive research for clients lately — checking hashtag volumes, tracking top posts in a niche, that kind of thing. Kept switching between Claude Code and browser tabs to cross-reference stuff manually. Got annoying fast. Found hikerapi-mcp, a Model Context Protocol server that exposes 100+ Instagram endpoints as tools directly inside Claude Code. Figured I'd try it. Setup was straightforward. The one thing I did differently was keeping the API key out of config files entirely — passed it as an environment variable instead. Smaller attack surface if I accidentally commit something. Also filtered down the tool groups with HIKERAPI_TAGS because 100+ tools showing up in context is chaos. I only need hashtag search and competitor profile data, so I scoped it to just those. "env": { "HIKERAPI_KEY": "${HIKERAPI_KEY}", "HIKERAPI_TAGS": "User Profile,Post Details,Search,Hashtags,Stories" } One thing that tripped me up for a solid 20 minutes: HikerAPI runs on a prepaid model (credits in rubles). If your balance is zero, you get HTTP 402, not 401. I kept thinking my key was invalid and regenerated it twice before I figured out I just needed to top up. Once that was sorted, it actually works well. Now I can ask things like "what are the top 10 posts for #socialmediamarketing this week" or pull a competitor's recent content directly in the same session where I'm building the campaign strategy. Cuts out a lot of context switching. Repo if you want to check it out: github.com/subzeroid/hikerapi-mcp Wrote up the full setup with config details here if useful: https://dev.to/simrp360/querying-instagram-from-claude-code-wiring-up-hikerapis-mcp-server-57jf Anyone else using MCP servers for social data research? Curious what other setups people are running.

Let's shine a spotlight on the open-source ecosystem. What are the best OSS products launched this year from your perspective? Dropping here are some of my favorite, most inspiring product launches so far, in no particular order. 5 awesome open-source products launched on Product Hunt in 2026 OpenClaw Launched last February on Product Hunt, the AI that "actually does things" is the fastest ever growing project on GitHub with 300k+ stars and 70k+ forks. It created a new category, enabling 50+ related products like moltbook (acquired by Meta) and KiloClaw - both ranked #1 Product of the Day. Kilo Code First launched last year, the open-source agentic engineering platform (19k+ GitHub stars) launched a code reviewer and a new VS Code extension this year. Both ranked #1 Product of the Day and #1 Product of the Week. InsForge The backend platform launched 2.0, hit 10k GitHub stars, ranked #1 Product of the Day, #3 Product of the Week, and joined YC. The Product Hunt effect? Tailgrids The 3.0 release of this React UI library ranked #1 Product of the Day. Ghost The latest project by @haydenbleasel , maker of next-forge , Kibo UI , and Ultracite , just cracked Product Hunt again, ranked #1 Product of the Day. Wrapping up Over to you! What are the best open-source products launched on Product Hunt in 2026 from your perspective? More awesome dev-first product launches in this repository for inspiration. Launched 42+ dev-first products on Product Hunt. AMA. fmerian fmerian fmerian Follow Feb 23 '25 Launched 42+ dev-first products on Product Hunt. AMA. # discuss # startup # marketing 1 reaction Comments Add Comment 5 min read

The IaC landscape split into two philosophies about a decade ago and hasn't fully resolved the argument since. On one side: declarative configuration languages designed specifically for infrastructure (Terraform HCL, CloudFormation YAML, Bicep). On the other: general-purpose programming languages brought to infrastructure (AWS CDK, Pulumi). Both approaches have won in production at major organizations. Neither is clearly superior. This comparison covers Terraform, AWS CDK, and Pulumi in depth — how they work, where they excel, where they struggle, and which makes sense for different team situations. It isn't a beginner introduction to any of these tools; if you're choosing between them for a real project, this assumes you've at least skimmed each one. The core philosophical difference Terraform's HCL is a purpose-built configuration language. It's not Turing-complete (no arbitrary loops, no recursion, limited conditionals). This is by design: HashiCorp's position is that infrastructure definitions should be readable, predictable, and safe to generate tooling around. When you read a .tf file, you can understand what it creates without executing anything. CDK and Pulumi take the opposite position: the limitations of configuration languages are a tax on productive engineers. Why invent a domain-specific language when TypeScript already exists? Real programming languages have proper abstractions, test frameworks, package managers, IDE support, and a billion engineers who already know them. Infrastructure should be no different from application code. Both positions have merit. The choice between them often comes down to who's writing the infrastructure more than which approach is technically superior. Terraform Terraform is the default choice for infrastructure-as-code in 2026. It works with every major cloud provider and hundreds of minor ones. The Terraform Registry has thousands of modules — reusable packages for common patterns like VPCs, EKS clusters, and RDS databa

A while back, I needed to integrate SMS into a .NET project. Giant SMS had a REST API, but no official .NET client. The only existing library was a PHP one from 6–7 years ago, and it only covered two methods: send and getBalance. So I built my own. It now has nearly 2,000 downloads on NuGet. Here's exactly how I did it. The Problem Wiring up raw HTTP calls to the Giant SMS API in every project gets repetitive fast: Manually setting Authorization headers Remembering which endpoints use token auth vs. username/password Deserializing responses every time Scattering credentials across your codebase I wanted something that felt native to .NET. Configure once in appsettings.json , register with DI, and just call a method. Designing the Public API The first decision was the interface. I wanted consumers to never touch HttpClient directly, and I wanted methods that mapped clearly to what the API actually does: public interface IGiantSmsService { bool IsReady { get ; } Task < SingleSmsResponse > SendSingleMessage ( string to , string msg ); Task < SingleSmsResponse > SendMessageWithToken ( SingleMessageRequest messageRequest ); Task < BaseResponse > SendBulkMessages ( BulkMessageRequest messageRequest ); Task < SingleSmsResponse > CheckMessageStatus ( string messageId ); Task < BaseResponse > GetBalance (); Task < SenderIdResponse > GetSenderIds (); Task < BaseResponse > RegisterSenderId ( RegisterSenderIdRequest senderIdRequest ); } Seven methods, the full surface of the API, no more, no less. The IsReady property is a small but useful addition. It lets consumers do a quick sanity check at startup rather than discovering a missing token on the first SMS send: csharp _isReady = !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(_connection.Token) && !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(_connection.Username); Handling Two Auth Methods This was the most interesting design challenge. The Giant SMS API uses two different authentication schemes depending on the endpoint: Token-based (Basic Authorization header) —

A practical reflection on why coding agents lose the thread between sessions, and why the repository itself is the right place to preserve it. I used to think the problem was memory. That was the obvious diagnosis. Every new coding-agent session started with the same ritual. Open the repository. Read the README. Inspect the project structure. Search for the files that looked important. Reconstruct the task. Guess which commands mattered. Ask again what had already been tried. Then do the actual work. Sometimes. Because a lot of the work was not work. It was orientation. A coding agent can have a large context window and still lose the operational thread. It can have chat history and still fail to know what happened in the last run. It can retrieve semantically similar notes from a vector store and still miss the one fact that mattered: this command already failed. the previous session stopped here. this file looked relevant, but it was a dead end. the validation was not actually run. One day I stopped thinking about the problem as "agent memory". That word was too broad. Too attractive. Too dangerous. Because once you say memory, the temptation is to build a bigger one. A bigger context window. A bigger note store. A bigger vector database. A bigger archive of everything the agent has ever seen, said, touched, generated, or vaguely implied. That sounds powerful, but it is also how you build a very expensive junk drawer. Context is not continuity Context is what the agent has available now. Continuity is what lets the next execution continue from what actually happened before. Those are not the same thing. Long context helps while a session is alive. It gives the model more text to work with. More files. More prior messages. More implementation details. More room. Although it is really useful it does not automatically produce continuity. When the session ends, gets compacted, moves to another tool, switches from one coding agent to another, or simply starts tomorrow

Most of us use AI coding tools in a very normal way. We paste an error, ask for a fix, paste a file, ask again, run a command, paste the output, and keep going. After some time, we get a message saying something like you are out of tokens or you have reached your message limit . Most of the time, the reason is tokens. What is a token? A token is a small piece of text the model reads or writes. It can be a word, part of a word, a symbol, or spacing depending on the language and context. The model does not see text exactly like we do. It breaks everything into tokens first. So when you send a message, you are sending input tokens. When the model replies, it creates output tokens. If your coding agent reads files, terminal logs, docs, diffs, and old chat history, that can also become input tokens. What is a context window? The context window is the amount of text the model can keep in view at one time. It includes your message, the previous conversation, files, tool output, system instructions, project rules, and the model's own reply. Some models can hold a lot now. 200K tokens is already common in many coding workflows. Some newer models can go near 1M tokens. That sounds huge, and it is huge. But it does not mean you should always use it. Roughly speaking, 1M tokens can be hundreds of pages of text. It can be a big part of a codebase, many docs, or long chat history. But the model still has to read through that text. More context can mean more cost, more waiting, and more chances for the important thing to get buried. A rough mental model: Context size What it might hold 32K tokens A few files, a long bug report, or a small feature discussion 128K tokens Many files, long logs, or a decent chunk of project docs 200K tokens A large debugging session with files, logs, and history 1M tokens Hundreds of pages, big docs, or a large slice of a codebase This is not exact. Different languages, code, spacing, and tokenizers change the count. But it gives you the idea. Large c

Big update. The PDF hub is fully built out and a whole set of Office conversion tools just shipped. PDF hub complete (18 tools): Merge, split, compress, rotate, reorder, extract pages, remove pages, watermark, page numbers, protect, unlock, extract images, and more. Office ↔ PDF (6 tools): Word to PDF Excel to PDF PowerPoint to PDF PDF to Word PDF to Excel PDF to PowerPoint Office ↔ Office (3 tools, fully browser-side, no file upload): Word to Excel Excel to Word PowerPoint to Word Other recent updates: WordPress plugin updated to include the new PDF tools Chrome extension v1.1.0 updated with PDF support 1.6K pages now indexed on Google across 25 languages That brings the site to 61 free tools across three hubs (Image, PDF, Office), no signup required.

Anyone who works with Ruby on Rails knows that, despite the framework being incredible for productivity, there are some classic workflow deficiencies that haunt almost every project. You are focused on writing code, but suddenly you need to open an external tool like Postman to test a route. Then, you run a complex script to generate a static database diagram. And at the end of the day, you still need to manually update the API documentation, which will inevitably become outdated in the next sprint. This constant context switching and manual maintenance generates enormous friction. To cover these deficiencies, I developed three gems that bring these tools inside your application. They are so practical that they quickly become indispensable in any Rails project. Meet each one of them: 1. rails-api-docs : The End of Outdated Documentation The deficiency: API documentation always starts with good intentions, but as the system evolves—new routes, parameters, and response fields—it quickly stops representing reality. Keeping this updated manually is repetitive and frustrating work. The solution: The rails-api-docs gem solves this by leveraging what Rails already knows. It inspects your routes, controllers (via AST analysis using Prism), and the ActiveRecord schema to automatically generate the first draft of your documentation. Everything is saved in a single YAML file ( config/rails-api-docs.yml ), which serves as the single source of truth. Why it is indispensable: Append-only strategy: When adding new routes and running the generator, the gem only appends what's new. Your descriptions, custom examples, and tags are never modified or deleted, making the documentation a living document. Zero development friction: You edit the YAML in one window and view the updated documentation in the browser at localhost:3000/rails/api-docs instantly, with no build step required. For production, it exports a single static HTML file without any external dependencies. 2. rails-http-lab

A meta tag audit is a pile of binary checks. Title present, yes or no. Title in range, yes or no. Description present. One H1. og:image set. Canonical present. Run them all and you get a few dozen booleans. The problem is that a wall of green and red checkmarks does not motivate anyone. People glance at it, feel vaguely bad, and close the tab. A single number does motivate. "You are at 62" is a thing a person will act on. But a number only works if it is honest, and a number is only honest if it is explainable. So we set one hard constraint before writing any scoring code: every point a page loses has to trace back to a named check with a specific fix. No mystery deductions. If you are at 62 and not 100, the tool can point at the exact items that cost you the other 38. That constraint shaped every decision that followed, and it is the reason the rubric looks the way it does. This is the write-up of how we got from a pile of booleans to a number we are willing to defend. Choosing the dimensions and the weights The first decision was how to group the checks. We landed on five dimensions, each with a fixed weight, and the overall score is their weighted average: Basic meta, 30 percent. Title tag and meta description. Headings, 20 percent. H1 count and heading-level hierarchy. Open Graph, 20 percent. og:title, og:description, og:image, og:url. Twitter Card, 15 percent. twitter:card, twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:image. Technical, 15 percent. Canonical, html lang, viewport, robots. The weights are the opinionated part, and they encode what we actually believe about how pages get found now. Basic meta gets 30 percent, the largest slice, because the title and description are the strings an AI engine quotes when it summarizes or cites a page. They are the highest-value characters on the whole page, so a gap there should cost the most. Technical gets the smallest slice at 15 percent, but for a subtler reason than "it matters least." Technical failures are rarer

A post by Ben Halpern

Most developer tools in 2026 want your data. They want you to create an account, sync to the cloud, share analytics, and join a team plan. Every new tool is another service that knows what you are working on. I wanted something different. CodeFootprint CodeFootprint is a Mac app that tracks file changes in your project folders. It records every edit with full diff, every deletion with recoverable content, and precise timelines for everything. And it does all of this without ever connecting to the internet. How It Works Select a folder to monitor Code as normal — CodeFootprint records in the background Open it anytime to see what changed, when, and how Export change traces to share with AI tools for debugging The Design Decision I made a deliberate choice: no accounts, no cloud, no telemetry, no data leaving your machine. Not because cloud is bad, but because your project files are some of the most sensitive data you own. Your code, your configs, your unpublished work — a file change tracker sees all of it. A tool that watches everything you change should be trustworthy by design, not by promise. For Developers Who Use AI Tools If you work with multiple AI coding tools, CodeFootprint gives you something valuable: a shared context you can export. Instead of manually explaining to each new AI tool what happened in your project, you hand it a trace file and say "here is the history." Available Now CodeFootprint is on the Mac App Store . No account needed. No internet required. Your files stay on your machine. More convenience. More protection. More peace of mind.

The least interesting thing an AI coding agent can do now is generate code. That sounds harsher than I mean it. Generation still matters. Better models still matter. Faster edits still matter. But if you have used these tools on a real codebase, not a demo repo with three files and no history, you already know where the pain moved. The bottleneck is not "can the model write a React component?" The bottleneck is "does the agent understand why this repo is weird?" Real repos are full of weirdness. Naming conventions nobody wrote down. Migration leftovers. Feature flags with political history. Tests that exist because of one brutal production incident. API boundaries that look accidental until you remove them and break billing. A hundred tiny facts that separate a useful change from a confident mess. Coding agents are getting much better at editing files. The next stack has to get better at making the system legible before the edit starts. Bigger context windows are not the same as understanding The lazy answer is to throw more context at the model. Give it the whole repo. Add the README. Add the docs. Add the last five tickets. Add the architecture decision records. Add the transcript from the previous session. Add the test output. Add the package lock, because why not. That works until it does not. A larger context window can hold more text. It does not automatically turn that text into a map. It does not know which files are architectural boundaries and which are incidental wrappers. It does not know that one directory is deprecated unless the repo says so clearly. It does not know that a scary-looking validation branch is protecting a partner integration from 2021. More context can even make the problem worse. You get the pleasant illusion that the agent has seen everything, while the useful signal is buried under raw file dumps and old notes. Repo understanding needs structure. That is why tools that turn codebases into graphs, domain maps, guided tours, semantic

If you've used other browser-based code editors, you've probably noticed that the terminal feels off. You can run a script. You can print to stdout. But the moment you try to install a package and then actually use it in the next command, something breaks. The environment doesn't carry over. It feels like every command starts from scratch in a vacuum. That was the problem I wanted to solve when building the terminal for Cloudpen. Not just a place to run isolated snippets, but a proper environment where you can install dependencies, run build tools, and have everything you did in one command still be there for the next one. What most cloud terminals get wrong The core issue is that running code in the browser is hard to do without cheating somewhere. A lot of tools use sandboxed environments that look like a terminal but don't behave like one. They're good enough for demos. They fall apart in real work. The thing developers actually need is simple: if I install something, it should be there when I run the next command. That's it. That's the whole requirement. Surprisingly few cloud tools actually deliver it. How Cloudpen handles it Without going into the full technical detail, the short version is this: every command runs in a completely isolated environment, but all commands within your session share the same filesystem. So when you run npm install, those files are written somewhere. When you run your next command, that somewhere is exactly where it looks. Package installs work. Build tools work. Multi-step workflows work. And because each command runs in a clean, isolated environment, there's no bleed between users or sessions. The current terminal is optimized for commands that run to completion, while live application previews are handled through Cloudpen's deployment system. On the free plan, you can run any file in your project and see the output directly in the terminal. The live coding environment where you type commands yourself is on the Pro plan. Both use

Last week I had a single tool: a JSON-to-TypeScript converter. Today I have 10. I spent a day building a full suite of developer tools - all free, all client-side (nothing leaves your browser), and all open source on GitHub. The Suite DevForge is a collection of tools I built because I kept opening 15 different tabs every day: 1. JSON ? TypeScript Paste JSON, get TypeScript interfaces or types. Supports nested objects, arrays, custom root names. 2. CSV ? JSON Bidirectional conversion with header detection and delimiter support (comma, semicolon, tab). 3. Regex Tester Live regex testing with flags (g, i, m, s, u, y), match highlighting, and replace functionality. 4. Base64 Encoder/Decoder Encode text to Base64 and decode Base64 back to text. Unicode-safe. 5. JWT Decoder Decode JWT tokens into header, payload, and signature components. Read-only - no verification, no security risk. 6. SQL Formatter Uppercase keywords, indentation control. Handles SELECT, JOIN, INSERT, CREATE - the common stuff. 7. Diff Checker Side-by-side text comparison with LCS-based diff algorithm. Color-coded additions and removals. 8. UUID Generator Generate UUID v4 (or v1) in bulk. Copy individual or all at once. 9. Timestamp Converter Convert Unix timestamps to readable dates and back. Shows seconds, milliseconds, ISO 8601, UTC, and relative time. 10. Color Converter Convert between HEX, RGB, HSL, and CMYK. Color picker, presets, named color support. The Tech Stack Zero frameworks. Zero dependencies. Zero backend. Every tool is a single HTML file with embedded CSS and JavaScript. They all run entirely in the browser - no data is sent to any server. Hosted on GitHub Pages. Free forever. Why I Built This I'm a solo developer based in Nepal. Building things that help other developers is how I learn, grow, and (hopefully) earn. The suite is free, but there's a Pro tier ( one-time) that unlocks: File exports Batch operations Custom naming conventions Priority support I also do freelance development

Original post: GitHub Copilot for Engineers: Getting Better Results GitHub Copilot moved to usage-based billing in June 2026, dropping the flat subscription model that made monthly costs predictable. For teams using it heavily across multiple projects, that shift puts a premium on being deliberate: reaching for the right model, keeping prompts focused, and building a configuration that produces good results without a lot of back-and-forth iteration. Many of us install the extension, start with the defaults, and only tune settings later. The defaults are a reasonable starting point, but they are not a full configuration. A small investment in setup changes how much you get out of every request on an ordinary working day, and that matters more now that each request has a cost attached. This guide covers the full path: getting the tooling in place, choosing models with cost in mind, layering global and project-level rules, and building out instructions, agents, and skills that make Copilot predictable across different kinds of work. Architecture overview Diagram fallback for Dev.to. View the canonical article for the full version: https://sourcier.uk/blog/github-copilot-for-engineers Before you start Subscription and VS Code extension You need an active GitHub Copilot subscription. Plans are available at individual, business, and enterprise tiers at github.com/features/copilot . Once active, all tools use your GitHub account credentials. The GitHub Copilot extension for VS Code is the primary day-to-day interface. Install it from the Extensions panel or via the CLI: code --install-extension GitHub.copilot The extension provides inline completions as you type, Copilot Chat in the sidebar, inline chat on any selection via Cmd+I / Ctrl+I , agent mode for multi-step tasks, and multi-file edits with a single review step. Defaults keep improving, so avoid cargo-culting old setting lists. Focus on non-default tweaks that improve signal quality and control usage: Setting Value