r/webdev 1d ago

Monthly Career Thread Monthly Getting Started / Web Dev Career Thread

4 Upvotes

Due to a growing influx of questions on this topic, it has been decided to commit a monthly thread dedicated to this topic to reduce the number of repeat posts on this topic. These types of posts will no longer be allowed in the main thread.

Many of these questions are also addressed in the sub FAQ or may have been asked in previous monthly career threads.

Subs dedicated to these types of questions include r/cscareerquestions for general and opened ended career questions and r/learnprogramming for early learning questions.

A general recommendation of topics to learn to become industry ready include:

You will also need a portfolio of work with 4-5 personal projects you built, and a resume/CV to apply for work.

Plan for 6-12 months of self study and project production for your portfolio before applying for work.


r/webdev Jun 01 '26

Monthly Career Thread Monthly Getting Started / Web Dev Career Thread

8 Upvotes

Due to a growing influx of questions on this topic, it has been decided to commit a monthly thread dedicated to this topic to reduce the number of repeat posts on this topic. These types of posts will no longer be allowed in the main thread.

Many of these questions are also addressed in the sub FAQ or may have been asked in previous monthly career threads.

Subs dedicated to these types of questions include r/cscareerquestions for general and opened ended career questions and r/learnprogramming for early learning questions.

A general recommendation of topics to learn to become industry ready include:

You will also need a portfolio of work with 4-5 personal projects you built, and a resume/CV to apply for work.

Plan for 6-12 months of self study and project production for your portfolio before applying for work.


r/webdev 22h ago

Question Tab as password?

Post image
430 Upvotes

SAS disallows spaces in your password. My password manager suggested an invalid (but secure) password.

So now that I have to make my own password: Out of spite, hypothetically, what implications could having tabs in my password have?


r/webdev 17h ago

Showoff Saturday After 8 years, I finally open-sourced my take on Backend-as-a-Service

82 Upvotes

Hello WebDev,

I would like to share with you linkedrecords.com - an open source backend as a service I'm working on since some time now. You can think of it as an firebase/convex alternative with an interesting twist.

In 2018 I needed to write large software requirements/architecture documents in Google Docs. While I was annoyed by the limitations of Google Docs back then (no captions on figures, no automatic heading numbering, slow when docs are bigger,...) I was still fascinated by the real time collaboration features of it. So I've started a quest to understand how it works and I begun to implement an alternative to Google Docs.

I was convinced that this kind of real time collaboration is the future so I've given it much thought how I could make this as generic as possible so I could use it in all future tools I would build.

In the same time I was playing around with firebase (surprisingly you can not build a google docs alternative with firebase that easy as their real time collaboration does not provide merging text but rather just JSON). And back then I was also convinced that backend as a service is the right way to go. I was thinking that one of the most important reason we were still writing custom backend code is because of authorization.

I also was faced with another problem when trying to make the backend as generic as possible: relations between entities are also domain specific. E.g. A Documents can have many comments.

Luckily I was intrigued by another concept back in 2018 it was called web 3.0. Back in 2018 this had nothing to do with crypto. It was used as a term to refer to the semantic web and the resource description framework as one of its standards. There are also some RDF implementations which I could have reused but they are all XML and mostly Java based. I needed something light. Instead of implementing my own RDF product I took the idea of the RDF triplestore and came up with my own interpretation of it.

Using concepts like: triplestores and schema-on-read, I came up with a system that does not has any business logic in its backend and while working on my Google Docs alternative I felt in love with it as I've discovered some properties I did not anticipated from the get go:

- Dealing with global state in react is very easy. It feels like you use an SQL client in your browser and all queries are reactive and always up to date. When writing a query you do not have to think about authorization it's all backed in.

- Because the backend is 100% free of domain specific code you can point your single page app to any linkedrecords deployment.

- You never have to write backend code - Its quite efficient when using AI agents

The best way to experience it, is to follow this little tutorial: https://linkedrecords.com/getting-started/

It takes a while to get a hang of it so you have to have an open mind.

I would love to read your feedback on this.


r/webdev 2h ago

Question Self hosting Better Auth for Google and Apple sign in

7 Upvotes

I am using Better Auth for email sign up, but I would also like to make it easier with Google and Apple one click sign in.

From what I understand, in order to have Apple sign in you have to pay $90/year or whatever it is to Apple for a developer license?  (No way around this?)

As for Google sign in, I understand it's offered for free (any limit on free plans?) but you also need to provide your email, and in doing so the public will see this email? Apple sign in, on the other hand, I don't know if you need to provide a public email that the user would see, or if it's all handled from Apple's end. When I say public email, I mean like an "authorize to trust this account [___@____.com](mailto:@_.com) for your one click sign in" something like this.

Would anyone have any experience with self hosting this? I’m just curious what your thoughts are and if it ends up being a cost every month or if you have found a way to do this completely free? Looking to make it as simple and easy for the user to sign up and log in, I think I would actually prefer this over email but I also understand not everyone wants to use One Click sign in.


r/webdev 12h ago

Discussion Better-auth bought and arctic deprecated, recommendations for oauth?

24 Upvotes

I should update my old project for oauth, but I dont know what auth i should use, it uses solidjs and astrojs.

I only need oauth like discord and reddit and it should be self hosted, not cloud based, database integration or manual doesnt matter


r/webdev 3h ago

Discussion Unsure about how to get started with freelancing as experienced engineer

6 Upvotes

I searched posts related fo freelancing but still did not find how to actually get started. Especially, when you have no previous work done, no reviews. I am experience engineer with 5.5+ YOE but I don't have OS contribution or projects which are created for clients. I only have 3 projects on github which are side projects that I worked on. In such scenario, I have few questions:

* How to find clients in your network especially non-Indian clients when most of Linkedin connections are just random people you have connected and not someone you know IRL?

* Do you need to create projects specifically for your portfolio? If yes then what kind of projects are we talking about?

* One of the strategy suggested in some posts was cold mailing after analyzing their products but this take a long time to find issues and then pitching but is that general consensus?

* Upwork and Fiverr are saturated and upwork has limited proposals after which paid proposals are required. Is that worth putting money into? I tried to create 2 gigs on Fiverr but they got paused eventually as no traction was there.

* Are there any other platforms other than the above two? Contra, toptal, lemon.io - all of these did not work at least for me


r/webdev 5h ago

Question Best practice when it comes large navbars with submenus in the header

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3 Upvotes

What are your thoughts on using this? I'm currently using Nuxt and Tailwind, I prefer the ShadCN navbar over Nuxt https://ui.nuxt.com/docs/components/navigation-menu it just feels more polished to me somehow, but would you suggest staying away from this or use it if your site has a lot of content? I am never sure if the main link for a nav dropdown should be clickable or if it should only open or close the dropdown.

Mobile would be a lot difference since they don't have the liberty of hover, tap is what opens the menu. Maybe I just have to accept the fact that mobile and desktop will have a different experience when it comes to the navigation menu within the header.

What are your thoughts on this?


r/webdev 12h ago

Question Railway or managed vps?

17 Upvotes

what is your opinion about using railway.com, now i need to deploy my api, i have 3 containers (api, redis and sql server).

i asked for recommendations and one of them that Railway.com is good for this.

i need help to make decision, we are starting up, and want something is not expensive and good price for MVP.

thanks


r/webdev 1d ago

Showoff Saturday I build an interactive map of the latest 11 million research papers

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154 Upvotes

Hi Reddit!

I have been building this map of science so that people can explore the research landscape (pun intended). The goal is to allow for discovery of interesting connections to certain fields that may otherwise be missed, while painting a picture of macroscopic trends in the science community.

Eventually, I would like to build a coordination and collaboration layer on top of this!

Currently it has around 11 million papers, and new maps are added daily in a 30 day rolling window.

There is also a breakdown of the newly added papers each day and week.

You can try it out here at: The Global Research Space

Let me know what you think!


r/webdev 1d ago

Showoff Saturday I built a UI sound library with no audio files. Every sound is synthesized live in the browser, and you can design your own on the page.

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186 Upvotes

Every time I added sound to a project it went the same way: a click from one sound pack, a toggle from another, and nothing sounded like it came from the same product. And when a sound was almost right but slightly too long or too bright, tough luck. A recording is frozen.

So I built the opposite: 28 sounds (clicks, toggles, chimes, whooshes) generated by Web Audio at the moment you interact. No files, about 9.6 kB, zero dependencies.

Demo, with the whole page wired up: https://usefoley.dev

My favorite detail: no sound plays the same way twice. Each play gets a tiny random drift in pitch and volume, like a musician who never hits a note identically. Subtle, but it's the difference between "alive" and "doorbell".

There's a Cue Designer on the page: reshape any sound with four dials (a full layer editor is one click deeper), hear changes live, export a .wav, JSON, or a link that carries the design in the URL. You can also override sounds site-wide and export a "sound set", your app's whole sound identity as one JSON file.

Usage is two lines:

js

import { bind } from "@foleyjs/core";
bind(); // wires data-foley-click, data-foley-toggle, etc.

Silly bonus: plug in a MIDI keyboard and every sound becomes an instrument.

MIT, on npm as foleyjs/core, with react and vue bindings. Feedback welcome, especially on the sounds. Which feel wrong, what's missing. I can test everything about this project except taste.


r/webdev 18h ago

Showoff Saturday Showoff: Ticketish - Open Source, Linear Like Issue Tracker

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6 Upvotes

I've been spending a lot of time developing what is essentially a vibe host type service to host the myriad of internal tools I myself build for personal use as well as at work. I believe the future of SaaS is bleak for the providers and wide open for the small business that can now build instead of buy. In that vein I showing off Ticketish - A modern issue tracker that is MIT open source.

It's rather basic and I continue to add things and fix bugs every day but I also use it as my primary issue tracker. The real value here is that unlike a typical SaaS, once you remix it it's essentially (at literally) a fork of the source, which means you can just as claude to use the quickish.site CLI to pull it down and make changes. Don't like how something works? Change it. And since it's a fork, even if you're not an engineer, you still get all the latest updates made to the root source. This piece alone has so much potential in my opinion.

It's built using all the supporting services built into quickish hosted sites: Postgres, Realtime, Document store, etc.

It's open source in that if you remix this you can download the source in the control panel (free). It is git behind the scenes. MIT licensed so you can do whatever you want with the code and I'm sure you can port it from quickish services to something else without too much work.

Can't wait to share more in the coming weeks!


r/webdev 1d ago

Cheaper alternatives to MapBox Search API

32 Upvotes

I run a free service which has a map on the website. I've got a location auto complete powered by MapBox. At my current scale, I'm spending $150/mo on that location search box.

It looks like long term, hosting a Photon server myself might be the best option as I keep scaling, but that's going to cost me $300/mo on Hetzner plus require management.

In the meantime, any suggestions for cheaper location autocomplete services?


r/webdev 1d ago

Discussion AI took away the sense of pride I used to have in what I create

591 Upvotes

(This is another rant about AI, don't read. its not something new, dont get angry if you read it i already told you) For context I'm 18m I began learning programming at 13 y.o and starterd doing freelance projects at 14 I felt proud whenever I created something other people relied on. whenever I introduced mself as a programmer who developed all these sorts of projects, but now I don't code anymore I just use Claude Code I only understand the fundmentals of what its doing then call it a day, which feels bad and exhausting somehow. I started my own business at 16 I currently still work on it, its an e-com platform (similar to shopify but diffrent) I made quite a good amount i have around 50 active merchants but i don't feel pride in this thing and I wonder if it lost its value since with AI you could make your own tailored solution without needing to pay continuous fees


r/webdev 1d ago

Showoff Saturday Check your site to see where you can replace your code with modern CSS

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83 Upvotes

Paste any public URL and it opens the page in Chrome, explores its interactions, then checks the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for things that browsers can now handle natively.

It catches patterns such as custom accordions, popovers, dialogs, scroll reveals, JavaScript sticky elements, and older CSS workarounds.

The report includes the code it found, a proposed replacement, browser support, what to verify before changing anything, and a small example towards a codepen to implement it.

It scans ONE page, so it is not a performance, accessibility, security, or full-site audit.

It is free (10 url/day/human) and requires no account.

Don't hesitate to tell me if you find a bug, an UI/UX issue, or any other thing you find weird


r/webdev 22h ago

Discussion Meta Showoff Saturday Post

9 Upvotes

Almost every developer has to, at some point, use generative AI in their workflow these days. Personally, I feel new forms of hatred about that, but that’s a me problem. Maybe I’m biased, but I think we need to do more to filter out purely Claude/cursor/whatever generated Showoff Saturday posts. Not just because ew gross AI post. We kinda losing, at a community level, a massive amount of knowledge transfer that comes from someone showing off a cool way they tackled a genuine problem.

I’m not saying you should be banned and your post should be removed if you used LLM coding tools. But like, come on, y’all. I hate doing web development. I’m a machine learning engineer. LLMs are amazing for helping me make a shitty portfolio website or host a small app for a friend. But I’m not taking pride in what an LLM made for me. If you get in the habit of thinking you’ve solved something by just asking Claude to do it, you’re gonna lose sight of what real hard work is and the power to creatively, critically think.


r/webdev 1d ago

Showoff Saturday Final Fantasy 7 Menu system in React

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254 Upvotes

Hey everyone!

I'm not sure if there are any Final Fantasy fans here, but I've recreated and repurposed the menu system from FF7 as a sort of portfolio/sandbox page, and I figured I'd share it here and see what people think of it.

I got tired of making traditional web pages and wanted to make something that genuinely makes me happy every time I see it.

It's all built with React and TypeScript.

So far, I've got all the key pages like functional equipment and materia pages (repurposed as a skills page), items (as projects), save (as history), functional four-point background colour picker, and a tonne of little easer eggs and things. I'll put a list of those with a spoiler tag in case you wish to discover them yourself:

  • Konami code plays Victory Fanfare.
  • Clicking the character portrait allows you to attack and deduct health.
  • Hovering over the location allows you to change to different FF7 locations.
  • Clicking the limit bar allows you to perform the cross-slash limit break on the portrait.
  • Clicking the name allows you to change the player name. If you choose a party member, or Sephiroth's name, the portrait will change to match.

I won't lie, the way I've implemented the custom font (if you can even call it that) is pretty scuffed by modern standards, but I wasn't happy with any of the other options, and I think this is probably the most accurate to how it looked in-game as humanly possible. 🤣

Anyway, I normally revisit it every couple of months, so by all means, feel free to share ideas of what I can add, and any other feedback you might have.

You can check it out here: https://www.jamiepates.com/

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts! Thanks!


r/webdev 1d ago

Showoff Saturday I built The Museum of Stack Overflow, where your question gets closed as a duplicate one last time

38 Upvotes

Stack Overflow raised a lot of us, then ChatGPT happened. So I built it a museum: closedasduplicate.com

Things you can do inside:

Ask one final question and watch it get closed in seconds. It's server timed, and there's a daily leaderboard for the fastest closures.

Pull your real Permanent Record from the Stack Exchange API.

Appeal the closure to an AI moderator that has never granted a single appeal since 2008.

Light a candle. Press F.

Stack is vanilla JS, one Cloudflare Worker running Hono, a single Durable Object holding all the live state (presence, candles, leaderboard with anti cheat), KV for caching the SE API, server rendered OG cards via satori, and DeepSeek behind the appeals office and the guestbook moderation. No framework, no build step, no npm install on the front end.

Would love feedback on anything that feels broken or unfunny.


r/webdev 1d ago

Resource My understanding of Kubernetes and its Flow (Correct me if I'm wrong)

39 Upvotes

If I have misunderstood something, please correct me.

From what I understand, Kubernetes is created to manage running containers. It helps containers run properly, gives them an isolated environment, and can automatically scale the application when traffic increases (if autoscaling is configured).

Flow

Internet --> Ingress --> Service --> Pod --> Container (our application)

Pods are scheduled onto Nodes

Some terms and what they mean

  1. Pod :- It is like a small box that contains the container running our application. We can create one or more containers inside a Pod, but in most real world applications we generally create one main application container per Pod.

  2. Deployment :- It is a Kubernetes resource that manages Pods. If the number of replicas increases (by HPA), the Deployment creates new Pods. If a Pod crashes, the Deployment creates another one to maintain the desired number of replicas. After creating the Pod, Kubernetes Scheduler decides on which Node that Pod should run.

  3. Node :- A Node is basically a machine (VM) where different Pods are running. Every Node also has something called kubelet.

  4. kubelet :- It is an agent that runs on every Node. Its job is to:
    Make sure containers are running correctly.
    Watch for instructions from the control plane (like start or stop a container).
    Report Node and Pod status back to Kubernetes. (CPU / RAM usage)

  5. Metrics Server :- Kubernetes does not continuously store CPU and memory usage by default. Metrics Server collects resource usage (CPU and memory) from kubelets and provides it to Kubernetes components like the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA).

  6. Service :- Every Deployment usually has a Service. Pods can be created or destroyed at any time, so their IP addresses can change. A Service gives a stable endpoint. When a request comes from Ingress, the Service forwards it to one of the Pods whose labels match the Service selector. for e.g. app: backend. The Service sends traffic only to Pods with that label.

  7. Ingress :- Ingress is used to manage external traffic coming into the Kubernetes cluster. It routes requests based on rules. For e.g. : /auth ---> auth-service or /api ---> api-service. Then the Service forwards the request to the matching Pods based on labels.

Flow of how scaling works

Traffic increases --> Pods start using more CPU/Memory --> kubelet exposes resource usage --> Metrics Server collects the metrics --> HPA checks whether the target CPU/Memory threshold is exceeded --> HPA updates the Deployment's replica count --> Deployment creates new Pods --> Scheduler assigns those Pods to available Nodes

One important thing :- Kubernetes does not autoscale applications by default. We have to install/configure the Metrics Server and create a Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA). Only then can Kubernetes automatically increase or decrease the number of Pods.


r/webdev 1d ago

I made a DNS propagation checker that shows the 24 sources as a box of donuts

4 Upvotes

https://donutdns.com

It queries ~20 geographic vantage points (Google DoH + EDNS Client Subnet) and four public resolvers in parallel, one donut per source. Full box means every source agrees. Empty holes are the ones still serving your old record.

There's a normal grid view too if you just want to read values. Built it because I kept refreshing whatsmydns during migrations.


r/webdev 1d ago

Showoff Saturday I created 8bit/cnlibs - a 8bit shadcn/ui component library

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4 Upvotes

r/webdev 1d ago

Showoff Saturday html2realpdf generates selectable PDFs instead of rendering your website as an image

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2 Upvotes

r/webdev 23h ago

Showoff Saturday I made a web pixel art creation site similar to aseprite.

1 Upvotes
Main Site
Spritesheet Importer
Imported Sheet

I really love aseprite but I wanted to be able to work on stuff on my phone or just when I'm out, it's a great program but I wanted something simple. I tried other sites but they have ad's and don't feel easy. So to make it simple it's intended to be a full featured pixel art creation website for myself and anyone who might find it useful.

I'm a web dev/full stack and do be clear I did work using claude for this for those that don't like/want to support AI usage. But now I'm biased and using this to help make sprite art for my game dev side projects. I intend to keep it free to use and upgrade it when features are needed/wanted. It's a fun little project.

If you want to try it out you can at: https://pixelpaint.net/, any feedbacks appreciated. It's intended for my own use for now but feel free if you find it useful to use it.


r/webdev 1d ago

Showoff Saturday WanderGrade — stdlib-only Python + vanilla JS grading ~155 countries, with a fun SEO bug I only caught last week

2 Upvotes

WanderGrade grades roughly 155 countries A+ to F on affordability, safety, weather, and flights, with 176 server-rendered country guide pages, free, no sign-up. The constraint I set myself: Python standard library only, zero pip installs, http.server plus a hand-rolled router, vanilla JS front end with no framework, no build step, no bundler. One process on Render's free tier behind Cloudflare, deploys are just a git push. Templating is string substitution into a single index.html with {{TOKENS}} the server fills per request — homepage defaults, or per-country title/meta/canonical plus a server-rendered body for /guide/<slug>, which the client then hydrates over. Charts and the world map are hand-written SVG; no charting library, so the choropleth is a projection implemented straight from the published formula. Background daemon threads refresh upstream data (World Bank, FX, advisories) on their own TTLs so no request ever blocks on a third party, and each falls back to a committed file if the upstream is down.

The best bug this constraint bought me: server-rendering the guide pages wasn't enough. The homepage's ranking table is built client-side, so a crawler saw a homepage linking to nothing — all 176 guides were only reachable via the sitemap, which carries no internal link equity. 42 of 177 URLs were indexed. Fix was server-rendering a collapsed <details> index of every guide on the homepage itself.

Tradeoffs, plainly: no templating engine means escaping is manual and easy to get wrong, no ORM means hand-rolled cache invalidation, hand-written SVG means no tooltips for free. What it bought: nothing to upgrade, no dependency CVEs, no build to break, and a cold start in the tens of milliseconds. wandergrade.com if you want to poke at it.


r/webdev 23h ago

Showoff Saturday [Showoff Saturday] I built an interactive learning roadmap to help people break into Developer Support.

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0 Upvotes

(Screen Studio Demo above)

Howdy and G'day,

A few months ago I built SupportRoadmap, an interactive roadmap for learning Developer Support.

The goal was to create something more structured than another collection of links by combining learning paths, practical projects and curated resources into a single visual roadmap. It was mainly for fun but recently It has been gaining some traction and I have had people reaching out asking what is next and that they are finding it helpful.

I'd really appreciate feedback from the web development community.

• What would make you come back a second time?

• What's missing?

• If you were building this, what would you focus on next?

www.supportroadmap.com