I've been freelancing for a while now and I keep running into this same pattern over and over.

Whenever I work with a client on a solid budget ($3k+), things usually run pretty smooth. They send a clear brief, reply within a day, trust my decisions, and pay invoices on time without arguing over every dollar.

But almost every time I take on a lower budget project (around $300), it turns into a massive headache. They expect a full custom site with e-commerce and complex animations, text me at 2 AM on weekends asking why a font moved slightly, and request 10 rounds of revisions after already approving the design. Then at the end, they still try to haggle over the final $50.

Is this mostly a psychological thing where lower budget clients feel like they're taking a bigger personal risk, or is it just poor boundary setting on our part as freelancers?

Would love to hear how you guys deal with this or what's the worst cheap client story you've had.

I'm a self-taught developer, and I know React and Next.js. Lately, I've been feeling increasingly anxious about my future as a developer.

AI is moving so fast. It can generate components, build entire websites, connect APIs, and even create full-stack applications. Sometimes I wonder what the point is of spending months learning something when AI can already do so much of it.

I want to get a better-paying developer job, but honestly, I'm confused about what I should focus on right now. Should I keep improving my React/Next.js skills, get better at backend development, or start learning AI engineering?

I keep hearing about RAG, AI agents, vector databases, LLM integrations, and all these new things. It feels like there's always something new to learn, and I'm worried that if I focus on the wrong things, I'll fall behind while everyone else moves forward.

For those of you already working in the industry, what would you do if you were in my position? Would you focus on becoming a strong full-stack developer first, or would you start learning AI engineering alongside web development?

I'm not looking for a shortcut or expecting to become an expert overnight. I just want to make the right decisions, build useful skills, and have a realistic chance of getting hired.

I'd really appreciate some honest advice from people who have been through this or are dealing with the same situation. Right now, I could genuinely use some direction.

npx codecity

Every file is a building, folders are districts, and height is the file’s length (or imports/exports). Files keep their place as the repo changes, so you actually learn the layout.

What it does:
• Colour by what changed lately, age, churn, file type or author
• Click a file to see what it imports and what imports it
• See what your last git pull changed
• Live mode: files light up as they’re saved (handy for watching a coding agent)
• Replay the whole history and save it as a video
• Share a link to the exact view you’re looking at

Run npx codecity in any repo (runs locally), or try any public repo in the browser: https://codecity.icy.dev/react/react

As with all my other npm packed, free and open source. Thanks all!

I've been building NetWasm, an independent C# compiler and runtime for WebAssembly.

The latest release produced a result I honestly didn't expect when I started this project:

NetWasm 0.8.0 + precise GC

• 47,798 bytes raw
• 13,501 bytes Brotli-11

Rust 1.95.0, size-oriented

• 53,635 bytes raw
• 16,963 bytes Brotli-11

Same print-42 workload, both WASI Preview 2 components, out of the box dev experience.

So C# is 10.9% smaller raw and 20.4% smaller compressed in this comparison - while carrying a precise garbage collector.

I'm not claiming arbitrary C# programs are smaller than arbitrary Rust programs. This is the classic tiny console-output footprint test: deliberately little application code so you can see how much runtime/toolchain baggage you're carrying.

The reason I care about this for web development is that download size matters.

I've always wanted C# in the browser without accepting a giant runtime as the entry fee.

Since I last talked about NetWasm, it can now do quite a bit more than tiny benchmarks:

• C# Web Workers, with each worker getting its own Wasm instance, heap and event loop
• Compile complete multi-file C# projects entirely in the browser
• Statically link native Wasm .a libraries through LibraryImport
• Native-to-managed callbacks
• C# 15
• Expression trees through a bounded interpreter, without general reflection
• HTTP/JSON/XML/Regex and a growing set of Microsoft.Extensions.* libraries
• Multiple GC/allocation strategies depending on whether you care more about size or throughput

There's also a NetWasm port of RegexStorm - regexstorm.netwasm.com - that runs entirely client-side in the browser - no backend doing the regex work.

The bigger idea behind NetWasm is pretty simple:

C# shouldn't inherently mean shipping megabytes of runtime.

For browser UI workloads in particular, I want a model where you only ship the runtime machinery your application actually uses.

The Rust comparison is fun, but that's the part I'm really interested in: how small can a genuinely useful managed-language platform become when Wasm is treated as the primary target rather than something a desktop runtime also happens to support?

Would be especially interested in thoughts from people building larger Wasm/browser applications - the project is early so this is your chance to help shape the direction.

How far can you push an endless 3D world in the browser, especially on a phone?

That's one of the questions I've been exploring while building Planet 0 Drive, a low-poly driving game made with Svelte and Three.js.

The idea is simple: just drive. No set destination. Explore a world that keeps unfolding, find interesting spots, chase records, or cruise around with friends.

Under the hood, I've been experimenting with a few things:

• Procedural terrain, weather, and long-distance rendering with Three.js
• Peer-to-peer multiplayer with movement interpolation
• Spatial audio and performance optimizations
• Version-compatible rooms to keep multiplayer sessions in sync

The most interesting part has been figuring out how much of the world I can generate and render while keeping things reasonably smooth, even on mobile.

It's been a fun mix of graphics, networking, and performance challenges, all built around the idea of a relaxing drive.

Try it: https://planet0drive.vercel.app/

More about how I built it: https://zackwebster.com/blog/building-planet-zero-drive

Added two new things - Spanish premium voices and also made all premium voices available to everyone with no usage caps. Adding Spanish has been a goal of mine since I'm currently learning and wanted a way to get more consistent input with normal content.

Readox is a text-to-speech Chrome extension that reads web pages, PDFs, screenshots, and selections aloud right in your browser.

Word highlighting tracks the current word so it's easy to follow along while reading visually. Save anything you want to hear later (articles, Google Docs, PDFs, LLM responses, pasted notes) into a queue and play through it like a playlist.

Thanks for taking a look!

Chrome web store - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/readox/daipfoiakipdebhhklfongdfffepcffk

Cityhoppd.com. you log a trip with a city and a star rating, your map fills in, and public reviews end up on each city’s page.

A few things from building it that might be useful to someone here.

City search runs on the server against GeoNames cities1000, about 161k places. the annoying part was same-name cities, so everything carries the state now and Perth, Tasmania stops getting the photo of Perth, Western Australia. the index lives in memory in the function, about a second to load cold and around 50 ms per search warm.

This week I added PostHog without cookies and proxied it through my own domain so blockers don’t drop it. the usual next.config rewrite forwards every header, which would have sent everyone’s Supabase session cookies to PostHog. I moved the relay into proxy.ts (what middleware is called in Next 16) and strip cookie and authorization before passing anything on. easy to miss.

And link previews: profiles are only readable signed in, but WhatsApp and X unfurl signed out, so the OG image reads through one security definer function that returns something only if the owner turned previews on.

Happy to answer anything about how it’s built

Senior dev over here, company has over the last 8 months fully embraced copilot/general AI usage to the point we (small team of 4 devs) are have no capacity to review the PRs properly anymore. Our CTO who used to be pretty anal and hands on with PR reviews now defaults to wanting a “green light” from copilot reviews and honestly doesn’t even read the code properly anymore.

I’m more concerned about the development/ critical thinking and code analysis muscle memory loss in the short to long term as a dev. I’m well aware AI is pretty much here to stay but I fear the loss of building/actually knowing what is going on is going to have a larger than expected impact on most mid-senior devs.

I’m considering a simple approach - opening an open source repo that specifically does not allow mass generated AI code to be added to it, keep features clean and no bulk slap shit and go PRs. Use it for writing boilerplate and as a tool but not as a replacement, main goal is allow whoever who contributes to it to continue working that part of their brain. Idea behind what the product is doesn’t matter too much imo as long as it’s of value to users.

What do you think of this concept as a dev to alleviate the AI fatigue from work? ( Jesus typing this question at the end feels like I’m an AI bot at this stage)

I built ResumeForge, an open-source resume builder and job application tracker designed to help tailor resumes and cover letters to specific job descriptions using your own local models, while keeping exports (LaTeX, Overleaf ZIP, and PDF) completely free with no signup required.

Live demo: https://resume-forge.mnaveedk.com

GitHub repo: https://github.com/naveedkhan1998/resume-forge

How it works: You maintain one master profile with all of your work history, projects, and skills (or import an existing PDF/DOCX/TXT resume). When you add a job posting, it selects and reframes your existing experience to match the role, shows keyword coverage against the job description, and generates a tailored 1-page resume and cover letter.

A few things under the hood:

• Client-side LaTeX to PDF: To avoid running a heavy multi-GB TeX Live installation on the backend, the server generates .tex source and a custom .cls file, and the frontend parses and renders the LaTeX directly in the browser for live previews and PDF export.
• Word-level diffs for AI edits: Whenever you ask the AI to refine a section, it shows an inline diff (+added, -removed, reworded) so you can review or tweak every change before saving.
• Preloaded dummy data: Every new device session comes pre-populated with sample data (Adrian Monk) so you can test the tailoring workflow and LaTeX preview right away without uploading your own resume first.
• Local Ollama first + 50 free demo requests: The main goal is for people to clone the repo and run it locally with their own Ollama models (qwen3.5:9b, llama3.1, etc.). So you can try it in the browser first without setting anything up, the live demo uses my personal Ollama account at the system level with a 50- request limit per device session.

Stack: React 19, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind v4, Django Ninja, PostgreSQL (pgvector), and Nx.

(Note: the demo API is hosted on a free tier, so if it hasn't been used recently the initial cold start can take around 45 seconds to wake up).

Would love to hear your thoughts or feedback if you give it a spin!

I turned my Vue 3 game into a devvit app, that can be played directly on Reddit. PixReveal is a pixel art guessing game. A pixel drawing gets revealed pixel by pixel. The faster you guess, the more points you earn. The devvit version is more compact, focussing on quick rounds with 5 drawings to guess and a percentile showing "You are better than x% of players".

I'm sharing TabMerger, a browser extension I originally built to make managing lots of open tabs easier. I've recently rewritten it from the ground up and am actively working on it.

Why I Built It

When you have dozens or even hundreds of open tabs, keeping everything organized becomes difficult. I wanted a simple way to group tabs into collections, customize their appearance, and save them for later without relying on a complicated workflow.

You can check it out at https://tabmerger.com/ or explore the source code on GitHub.

I'd love to hear your honest feedback on the UX, feature ideas, or anything you think could be improved! Contributions are welcome!

https://soundtrackd.app, type a song and get films with the same feel. it's one cloudflare worker. gemini free tier first, then groq, then claude haiku only if both fail. every pick gets checked against tmdb so it can't invent movies, and repeat searches come out of kv in about 0.2s. the share image is drawn on a canvas right in the browser, posters loaded with cors so it can export, no server or image service. would love some front end roasting, especially on mobile

So I built a dating website 20 years ago originally as I needed to learn ruby on rails for a job. Ended up rewriting it in php a few years later but since then its just kinda sat doing its thing. Finally got around to redesigning it whilst Ive had some free time recently - my main aim was to try and make it more mobile friendly and reduce the number of full page refreshes (e.g clicking in to each message or viewing a photo used to be a full page refresh).

Would welcome any feedback. Ive not really touched the backend yet other than the rewrites to change the full page reloads to ajax calls. Its currently written in plain PHP with no framework - im thinking my next project might be a full rewrite in Laravel.

I would welcome any feedback on the new design and also any advice before I start the Laravel rewrite - never used it before, one thing im still undecided on is the best js library to use for the front end as im guessing thats gonna need another rewrite at the same time!

Link: https://www.altscene.com

Writeup/devblog: https://blog.gaborkoos.com/posts/2026-10-17-How-Not-to-Build-a-Five-in-a-row-Game_engine/

Hey everyone!

I've been working on a few animation-related side projects lately and decided to put them together in a personal portfolio.

It's made with Astro and currently features three projects:

• Loadersz
  • a collection of animated canvas loaders.
• Tip Glide
  • a shared tooltip that smoothly moves and resizes between elements.
• Stream Morph
  • animations for streaming text.

I tried to make the portfolio itself a bit more interactive, with animations throughout the site and a showcase for some (imo cool) stuff/ideas.

Curious what you think of the design and how everything feels to use. Especially interested in feedback on the animations, mobile experience and whether it's clear what each project actually does.

Portfolio | Loadersz | Tip Glide | Stream Morph

npm | github

Any feedback is welcome!

Pack any Svelte, React, Angular, or Vue app into a single C++ header. Serve it straight from ESP32/ESP8266 flash — gzip compressed, ETag cached, OTA-ready.

It is not for serve you website. It is for microcontroller programmer, who wants to make pretty webpages (component orientated) served from Esp32 or esp8266.

Hey all, some times ago I asked for feedback on this landing page of an open-source project. The main takeaway: it felt too dense and read more like docs than a landing page.

The density is partly intentional: it's a hybrid between a landing page and a kind of "distilled doc". So instead of cutting content I replaced the heaviest text blocks with diagrams (a before/after trace, anti-pattern pictograms, a flow for the different modes). Just a quick reminder: for the tech personas it's intended to backend and devops.

How good does it read now?

Thx!

Hello!

I am working with a company that has many, many sites. And the way we used to do components, we hard-coded every single one in every single project. This naturally has led to some inconsistency between sites when they’re supposed to look pretty identical.

Php include has become our life blood to mitigate some of these issues, but it still persists. The benefit, though, is that with php include, our sites automatically update when the “single source of truth” does.

My company wants to move to something more modern/popular and I got tasked with playing with frameworks. Think React, Next. My boss wants to replicate php include on these. I’ve spent the last several weeks looking into module federation, micro front-ends, anything to at least somewhat replace php include, but to no avail. That requires completely changing our server, which we do not have the ability to (as far as I know). These also sound like a nightmare to maintain, and our team is very small.

SEO is also a huge concern. I have module federation working on client side rendering, but ideally search engines would be able to index our work and, correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think client side rendered stuff is?

So now we’re stuck. I’ve suggested a monorepo, but with the amount of websites we have, the other developers worry about build times.

Believe it or not this is actually my first real-deal developer job haha, and I’m already stuck trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. So forgive me for any mistakes or misinformation, I’m still a junior trying to figure this out haha.

I was bored last weekend, so I ended up building this: a portfolio that looks exactly like the AWS Management Console. I tried to mimic it as closely as possible while adding my own flavour, like EC2 as projects, S3 as documents, and a lot more.

It’s open source and making it yours is super simple. No digging through code. Just run it in dev mode, open /studio, and you’ll find a Studio mode where you can edit everything right there. Add your own projects, documents and details, hit save, and that’s it, your very own AWS Console portfolio is ready.

There’s still plenty more that can be built, like a working CloudShell and AB Q, so contributions are very welcome if you want to take this further.

Would love feedback on what to add next or anything that feels off compared to the real console. And if you like it, don’t forget to drop a star on GitHub ⭐

• Live site: https://console.atharvabedekar.dev/
• GitHub: https://github.com/AB527/aws-console-portfolio

P.S. AWS folks, please don’t cancel me for this. It was designed out of pure love for the console :)

Hey everyone!

I'm 16 and recently finished building ArcadeX (https://pranav2mingame.netlify.app/), a lightweight browser arcade portal designed for quick mobile play.

Why I built it:

I wanted to build games that run directly in the browser with zero load screens, no app installs, and no login friction.

Tech stack & implementation:

- Pure HTML5 Canvas + Vanilla JavaScript (no external game engines or heavy frameworks).

- Tuned to maintain a steady 60 FPS on mobile browsers.

- Browser LocalStorage handles all game state, scores, and trophies locally.

- Hosted on Netlify.

Includes 10 mini-games (Flappy Fire, Snake Rush, 2048 Neon, Reflex Tap, Neon Pong, etc.).

Looking for technical feedback:

1. How does the canvas frame pacing feel on your phone/browser?

2. Any suggestions on optimizing the game loops or handling canvas resizing across different aspect ratios?

Thanks for taking a look!

I'm trying to design a 2 column form but can't decide how should I render error messages.

If I don't allocate a fixed height for an input div (label + input + error) then entire layout of form gets disturbed whenever an error message is rendered.

If I pre-allocate a fixed min-height for input div (label + input + error) then this does solves the layout shift issue but the form looks bad.

One option is showing an error icon and error message as tooltip on hover but this doesn't works on mobile as users would have to tap on the icon to get error message.

The only solution which I think would work is showing icon + tooltip on desktop and plain error message on mobile as on mobile the form is single column.

Is there any better way to handle this? Would appreciate any suggestion.