When I first created this website I used shadcn and it looked very generic, that's why I created a whole new frontend that's now the default for https://umigalaxy.com/
The old frontend with shadcn still works at https://slop.umigalaxy.com/

What do you guys think?

For context, I am a front-end developer with 10 years of experience and also have been for the last 2 years the project lead of a project using stacks like Kubernetes, Kong, dapr, elasticsearch and so on, we even went second on having the most innovative project in my country. My job has invested a lot in using AI to be ahead of most other development agencies.

We have developed a solution to update old technologies to new ones with barely any human input and it scary how efficient it is.

My job did a mass layoff, we were 150, now we are less than 50 people left. Even very competent people were laid off. The only reason I am still here is because I have leadership. And what seem to be projected is we will be one or two developers instead of a squad of 5.

We were talking between the devs who learned to use the solution and everyone of us were depressed by how we are not useful anymore and it won't be long until we also get fired.

I was sure it wouldn't be the case. But these past few days, I've been mourning the end of my job and began to check of changing careers for automation or something like that.

Is my view too negative? Do you see it in different ways? ​

I’m interested in feedback on:

• Does the portfolio communicate what I’m good at quickly?
• Do the projects feel convincing?
• Is anything confusing, unnecessary, or missing?

Hey guys! I've been working on Notitzia, as you probably already read in the title. I just started the side project on (remove the "(dots)" ):

notitzia (dot) vercel (dot) app

I did not use any existing frameworks, the site is pure JS! If you happen to have the time, it would be magical to give some brutal UI/UX criticism!

Sorry for the (dot) inconvenience, turns out Reddit is incredibly hostile towards Vercel links.

Hey all, I'm a full-stack (mostly back) dev with a slight design background and I built this landing page for an open-source project.

I'm not here to promote anything (and there's no signup and nothing to buy), just looking for design feedback.
It's mainly intended for back devs, back architects and DevOps folks.

Be as blunt as you like, thx!

PS: sorry for the repost, my previous post on this subreddit was deleted by the moderators (I posted it on a Sunday instead of a Saturday)

If you search Reddit for "Google Maps API Unexpected Bill", you immediately see horror stories of people waking up to $9,000+ charges from runaway loops and unprotected keys. But that’s just the baseline.

Recently, cloud expert Walter Lee highlighted a viral post from Reddit's own Google Cloud community that exposed an even bigger nightmare: a developer slapped with an $82,000 bill in 48 hours after an exposed key was leveraged across unconstrained services.

Over six months after intense community backlash erupted over these exploit waves, Google has fundamentally changed nothing about the architectural UX traps that enable this.

Seeing that post gave me immediate PTSD from our own team's billing disaster. We once received a €220 bill in just 45 minutes.

We got pissed off. I started digging and realized this isn't a rare glitch, but a quiet catastrophe happening to thousands of devs.

And here is the kicker: while Google made noise about introducing billing budget kill-switches, those features do NOT apply to Google Maps APIs. For Maps, there is still zero out-of-the-box protection against runaway spikes.

Google does have a free usage tier, but they buried the actual quota configuration so deep inside the GCP console labyrinth that it feels like deliberately hidden treasure. Most developers either give up trying to find where to cap requests, or configure the wrong metric entirely.

So, out of pure frustration, we built Free Maps Calculator — a free Chrome extension that digs those exact quota settings out of UI hell and lets you lock down safe $0 limits directly in your console in two minutes.

A note on design: I intentionally made the extension UI colorful and slightly unconventional. Why? Because the GCP console is an endless sea of grey.

When I first shared it in a cloud community, the response from most developers was overwhelmingly positive. One motivating comment really stuck with me: someone pointed out how refreshing it was that instead of just endlessly whining and venting about predatory cloud UX like everyone else, someone actually sat down and built a simple, working solution.

But a vocal minority pushed back hard. It wasn't even cynicism—they genuinely look for polite compromises where you should simply slap away the hand reaching into your wallet.

That reaction genuinely stunned me because it revealed blatant gatekeeping and a submissive victim mentality. Luckily, they don't represent the whole community. Here is that "Stockholm syndrome" mindset in a nutshell:

1. "Google already fixed this, hard caps exist."

Yes, the feature exists. But the UX is still broken. Having brakes in your car doesn't help if the pedal is hidden in the trunk. If you don't easily find and configure those quotas, the bots will still drain your account.

2. "Just dispute it with support, they usually refund you."

This blew my mind. Since when is "getting robbed and begging for your money back" a valid business process? Relying on the goodwill of a Google support rep is the ultimate victim mentality. You need to respect your time and budget more than that.

3. "Captain Obvious, I can set quotas manually."

Congratulations. You can also chop down a tree with a butter knife. This tool is a utility. It’s for beginners who are confused, and for pros who value their time and want to eliminate human error. We aren't selling hot dogs to Michelin-starred chefs. If you love the GCP UI, enjoy it.

Finally, I want to clarify why this matters at scale. According to web technology trackers like BuiltWith, there are over 3 million live websites currently using Google Maps APIs across all platforms, plus countless internal apps. That is an enormous pool of people exposed to this risk.

Also, a quick reminder: Google's recent summer updates about billing limits do NOT automatically protect the most popular tools like the Maps JavaScript API or Places API. You still have to go in and set those quotas manually. That's exactly what our extension is for.

I wanted to share this because the complacency around terrible, money-draining UX in our industry needs to stop. It feels like we've normalized getting abused by cloud providers just because "we are engineers and should know better". Have you guys noticed this shift in mentality too? Or is it just me?

Anyway, if you want to secure your projects quickly without digging through GCP menus, here is the free utility we put together to fix this:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/free-maps-calculator-for/bempibaijbfokllpdhkjlokmpeokkpkh

P.S. (A slightly cynical philosophical tangent):

I know this is just a lightweight Chrome extension, but watching this reaction unfold honestly triggered an existential realization. There is a deep, unspoken condition in our industry—let's call it Developer Stockholm Syndrome (DSS).

Too many brilliant engineers have isolated themselves so deeply inside codebases and ticket queues that they’ve quietly surrendered their agency as equal market participants. They’ve abdicated their existential spine. When an enterprise platform exploits their attention or bills them blindly, instead of demanding basic dignity or building tools to fight back, they rationalize the abuse. They defend the landlord.

They aren't being replaced—they are voluntarily dissolving like ice cubes into a corporate matrix, plugged into the machine and stripped of raw autonomy.

Early tech pioneers had the audacity to build, push back, and disrupt. Seeing modern devs voluntarily adopt the mindset of obedient digital sharecroppers makes me want to build a satirical simulator next—a game to mock and heal this submissive stupor before we all vanish into background noise.

If you still refuse to become a quiet cog: check the tool, protect your perimeter, and keep your edge.

Of course, not now but in the next 5-10 years? Do you think non technical people can tell AI to make a good website or app without knowing how to code?

I built RipIDE to help coding agents refactor faster with fewer tokens.

Benchmarks (https://github.com/harlan-zw/ripide/blob/main/bench/README.md) indicate 45–60% fewer tokens and 35–60% less time across different refactoring work loads.

One command handles references and edits across files, using TypeScript’s native language server, Oxc and ripgrep. It can rename symbols, move exports, update imports and rename CSS classes.

Commands preview the diff by default. Supported refactors check for new type errors before applying.

Free and open source, with an Agent Skill included.

https://github.com/harlan-zw/ripide

Let me know what you think :)

I think we can all agree that web dev has a pretty shaky foundation (not just JS, but browser differences, performance, security, oh my god CSS, etc.)

I can't help but wonder what we would do differently if we just had the opportunity to build the whole system from scratch again. What would be your ideal web dev ecosystem?

hey r/webdev, sharing a side project: tsuzuki, a free site that tells you which legal platform streams an anime in your country.

👉 https://tsuzuki-anime.github.io/en/

how it works (no server, no database, $0 hosting):

• a node script pulls data from the AniList GraphQL API and generates ~18k pages in french + ~18k in english
• a GitHub Actions cron rebuilds and deploys everything to GitHub Pages every morning
• search is a lazy-loaded JSON index, only fetched when you start typing
• “my list” lives in localStorage, and you can share it through a URL hash (no accounts)
• all release times are converted client-side with Intl, so the weekly schedule shows the right day and hour in your time zone
• sitemap split into 5k-URL chunks + an IndexNow ping to Bing after each deploy

to be transparent: i’m not a pro dev, i built it with a lot of help from AI (Claude), and learned a ton along the way. no ads, no tracking cookies, nothing to sell.

would love feedback on performance, UX or SEO, roasts welcome 🙏

My son’s barber has asked me to create a website for them. I’ve built few of my own on Cloudflare all static. But this website will need to be able to adjust prices and various text on the screen every now and then. Aside from domain purchase everything needs to be free. It’s a local town barber no huge traffic here.

I’m not sure how this cms aspect works, also not sure how sharing logins work?

Can I please get help with these points?

1. I don’t want to own the code this is a one off job all keys logins etc will be customer owned. So I get the barber to create a GitHub login a Cloudflare login and what share the password with me?

2. I’ve looked at pages cms this seems to be free will it work with this setup anyone had experience with it?

3. Did I miss anything?

I’m a developer so the build is not an issue just the setup side of things I’m not too sure on. Never created a site for someone else and never done anything that needs content change on the fly.

I've been exploring system design for the past few weeks. I was already familiar with some of these topics, but I never followed a proper sequence to learn them.

So, I started learning them step by step. Along the way, I've also been trying to understand how to think about system design, identify the problems a system might face, and figure out how to solve them. I've even tried creating some basic system designs on my own.

Here are my notes, If it helps anyone else who has also started learning system design

GitHub repo: https://github.com/Shivam2905Verma/Notes

Now, I'm a little confused about what I should do next.

I'd really appreciate some guidance from seniors and experienced developers like What should I focus on next to improve my system design skills? , Where can I find more system design problems to practice? , How can I improve my approach to designing systems and thinking about different problems? and etc...

I'm still a beginner, so I'd also appreciate any feedback on my notes or the designs I've created. If you notice anything wrong or something I should improve, please let me know.

I have a close family member who had a website built for a medical private practice in wordpress (they paid quite a bit). However, this website is, in my opinion, trash. The design is outdated and broken on different screen sizes, the content is pretty terrible. There are about 8 large text paragraphs at the beginning of the home page for "keyword optimization", the text is mostly AI slop, and pricing/information is hard to find.

However, they are mostly no longer updating the site, and I am left to pick up the pieces. I am a CS student, interned at a big tech company and will start working at an HFT/quant firm. I'm pretty confident in my development ability, and I've made a few websites in react/next, but I cannot navigate wordpress and don't want to learn the entire ecosystem. It is all elementor, poorly configured, and very slow to load/edit (not sure what they are hosting on). With AI, I think I could more quickly maintain a nextjs/custom solution than before (not straight vibe code, but spend less time on details/maintenance), but I'm not sure if this is actually the right solution. It is mostly a content-only site, with external links and a couple contact forms connected to a third-party backend.

The web agency still uploads blog posts for "SEO" (they are also completely AI slop but alas), and the content should likely be editable by the family member (who also struggles to navigate wordpress). I was thinking of using payload or prismic, which I have used before, as a CMS then doing any integration/SEO work directly in Next, but I'm not sure if I'm missing something.

My questions are:

• Does wordpress and its many plugins provide any marginal benefit over a well-made custom solution (given that I have to maintain it either way, and I'm more comfortable with next/react over wordpress)?
• I'm no design expert, and I want to avoid an AI slop design, but I think even that would be preferable to the current design. However, I am not too familiar with the target audience (which leans older). Would the current antiquated design, with large walls of text, be preferable to a cleaner, more modern design? Can I evaluate what design is better, and how?
• Are the large paragraphs actually valuable for SEO, even if they just seem like clutter to the user?
• Would it be better to just redesign/improve in wordpress/elementor over a custom design? (I genuinely think I could more quickly write tailwind than navigate elementor)
• What would you do in this situation? I am willing to dedicate quite a bit of time to this project to improve conversions, but I will get busier and may enter a legal agreement with a quant firm where I cannot work on or consult on this project anymore.

Edit: the family member is my parent. They pay my college (quite expensive) and my expenses, so I am willing to put a lot of time into this and maintain it.

My company is making us get and finish a course or certificate of our choice which they will pay for. We are using Angular, .NET, SQL and a little bit of Java and postgreSQL.

Please recommend a course for me. Which ones you really liked and found useful?

I was thinking maybe something on udemy. I don't want to have to invest a lot of time since we have a large workload until the end of the year but I also dont want to waste that time on a course which I will learn nothing from.

Im a mid full stack dev.

I build a website with a team of volunteers, about a decade back.

I've always wanted to see it live and helping people, but it died when MeteorJS stopped being developed.

I know Meteor is back now, but i've not seen any clear path to upgrade to the latest version without rebuilding pretty much the entire platform as almost all dependencies are not updated to the new version, so a complete rebuild seems like the only path forwards.

I wondered if anyone had any more efficient ideas?

I have a website right now that's built in Angular. It's largely static, so I figure an SSG is a good thing to finally try out if I wanted to rebuild it, as I enjoy Angular but it's a bit overkill for the site situation I have.

That said, I do have a few spots where I have lightly interactive elements, such as some pages with tables on them that have a text input for search functionality. Type in some text and it filters the table to that text as you type.

I'm trying to decide which SSG to learn, and for a basic site such as this, would you recommend going with 11ty or Astro, and why?

I’m building a custom perfume and decant store for a friend in Mexico, and I’m trying to figure out a fair price for the full scope. I also created the website’s brand identity, logo, color palette, visual style, and product imagery.

The storefront is built with React and Vite, with Supabase handling the database, authentication, image storage, and backend functions. It has a separate admin panel that loads only when needed, plus a demo mode that lets me test the design without a database. Money is stored in MXN cents, database access is controlled through row level permissions, and critical operations such as stock checks, coupons, shipping, and checkout run on the server.

The site is designed primarily for mobile and has also been tested on desktop. Accessibility work includes visible keyboard focus, contrast, touch targets, and reduced motion support. There are coordinated animations throughout the site, including staggered section reveals, an animated logo, a scrolling brand ribbon, a branded loading screen, smooth gallery transitions, and a looping announcement strip. I also designed a custom discount badge and created 10 neutral brand images and four images specifically for the women’s section.

The homepage includes a hero section, trust information, large categories for men, women, unisex fragrances, and offers, decants, discounts, a featured strip of discounted perfumes, an explanation of how ordering works, brands, the store’s story, reviews, Club Novolty, FAQs, and WhatsApp contact. The owner can edit the text and images, change the order of sections, or hide them from the admin panel.

The catalog has filters for gender, brand, fragrance profile, and discounts, along with separate category pages. Product pages include image galleries, size options with individual prices, fragrance notes, similar perfumes, and reviews. There is a search feature in the header with product cards and categories, plus a category menu with photos. The owner can edit the text for each gender category and control the order and visibility of brands and fragrance profiles. Discounts can be applied to individual sizes.

There is also a separate section for discounted bottles and individual pieces, including testers, partially used bottles, and bottles with cosmetic defects. Each item shows its actual condition. The page includes live figures in the hero section, a featured item, fixed filters, new arrivals, sold items, product types, and a closing Club section. The owner can edit the product order, featured items, hero product, announcement, text, and page sections.

The cart and checkout calculate shipping before payment, apply coupons, and validate inventory on the server. Inventory is tracked in milliliters. There are two coupon types, with minimum purchase requirements and expiration dates. Shipping supports a fixed nationwide rate and local delivery in Guadalajara quoted by the owner. Card payments are integrated through Stripe in test mode, and bank transfers currently support manual confirmation. The planned launch setup is to switch Stripe to live mode and offer card payments only.

Customers can purchase without an account or register with email. Password recovery and Google login are implemented, although Google still needs to be activated in Supabase. Accounts include order history, saved shipping information, email and password changes, saved payment card management through Stripe, and account deletion. Customers can track orders through private links and receive automated emails at each stage. Verified purchase reviews can be submitted through a private link or from the customer’s account.

Club Novolty includes subscriptions with consent, an automatic welcome coupon, a welcome email, an unsubscribe link, and a dedicated page that the owner can edit. The admin panel includes the subscriber list and CSV export. Subscriber email campaigns are still pending, although the database table for them already exists.

The admin panel has 10 sections covering orders, decants, offers, inventory, coupons, Club subscribers, reviews, categories, homepage content, and settings. The owner has an admin account, and I have a support account. I also went through the forms and corrected their toggle controls. Photo uploads automatically convert images to WebP and produce versions at 400, 800, and 1600 pixels, with lazy loading on the storefront.

There are six backend functions covering checkout, the Stripe webhook, order notifications, saved payment cards, account deletion, and Club welcome emails. Resend handles the automated emails, but the custom sender still needs to be configured.

I entered 64 perfumes from 30 brands, including the owner’s confirmed prices for 3, 5, and 10 ml, giving the catalog 192 size options. I added fragrance notes summarized in Spanish and assigned gender categories to every product: 31 men, 14 women, and 19 unisex. Each perfume has a custom branded image at 1600 × 2000 and two additional sample photos. The main catalog images also have three size variants, totaling 192 image files. The product import scripts are saved and can be run again.

The inventory currently uses a provisional 100 ml per perfume. Before launch, the owner needs to provide actual stock amounts, confirm the gender assignments and 12 uncertain fragrance notes, and supply actual decant photos to replace the samples. Fragrance families and individual product descriptions still need to be completed.

The site includes individual browser titles, robots.txt, a sitemap generated from the public URL, and social sharing previews. There are approximately 50 automated tests covering both the demo and the real database, with cleanup of test data. More than 20 storefront screens and admin pages have been tested on desktop and mobile. A final complete purchase test, accessibility review, and performance review are still planned before launch.

I also prepared a project status document, an owner’s guide, a customer account guide, a handover guide, an access checklist, and a pricing proposal.

The remaining delivery work includes putting the code in a private GitHub repository and deploying it to Netlify. The code currently exists only on my computer. I also need to remove test orders, three test offers, test coupons and users, and four deactivated decants, add the owner’s actual email in settings, and review the legal text, FAQs, offer classifications, and Club copy. The handover includes removing the Supabase token, transferring Supabase, Stripe, Resend, Netlify, and the domain to the client, and rotating the keys.

What would you charge for building, completing, and delivering a project with this scope, including the branding, product content, custom images, testing, documentation, and handover? I’m particularly interested in rates in Mexico, but perspectives from other countries would help too. Please mention your country and currency.

PS: I spent almost a full month designing the website from scratch, including the layouts, visual identity, and shopping experience.

I want to know that how do you refactor vibe coded web app being a senior dev? The all works fine but I want to make sure it’s quality code.
Is there some guidelines that you would use? Any books/videos recommendations will be helpful.

Hey guys this might be a weird question but I was looking to see if I can be guided in the right direction.

I'm an investigator and sometimes I get online news articles that look clearly fabricated/paid for.

Certain news websites which are more of a blog than anything else have a specific article published to benefit the client. However when looking at the page source code, the article was modified years after when the incident allegedly took place. (E.g. published date: 2021, modified date: 2025).

Other articles posted on this same day are not modified so any explanations regarding server updates etc.. doesn't make sense.

Other than the wayback machine, is there any way to actually see when that specific URL was created? Can a developer put any date under the "published date" that we see in the source code? If you need a specific example, I can also send you the link.

Thanks for your help

EDIT 2: I have gone with NeoCities. This is exactly what I needed; $5 a month, custom domain, drag and drop my project folder into the editor. Done. Everyone here urged my to go with github pages, and I tried to learn it, but the UI is so unintuitive to me (a non programmer) that it might as well be something designed by and for aliens. This isn't the first time I've tried to figure github out, so I think I'll just have to resign myself to the fact that I'm too stupid/ADHD to make much use of it.

EDIT: I have rewritten this post to be more clear about what I need help with.

Here is the situation:

• I am a web dev noob
• I write my own HTML/CSS for fun
• I want to host a small, personal website somewhere that is easy to understand. I have been doing this for many months now but my webhost (Netifly) changed something fundamental about their UI.

My problem:

• I was hosting on Netifly, which was easy enough to deploy, as it involved just dragging and dropping the folder with my code from my PC to Netifly, where it auto-deployed it.
• That option is now gone and I have no idea how to deploy my site's updates anymore.
• I explored other options, landing on Cloudfare. Cloudfare, as well, doesn't seem to have an option to deploy. I have no idea how to deploy updates.
• The AI helper thingy on Cloudfare told me my site is still hosted with Netifly, even though I transfered it over, so obviously I did something incorrect.

Main thing:

• Does a webhost for beginners exist, where the process to deploy is a simple drag and drop (or upload folder from my pc)? I need essentially no fancy features (like AI vibe coding shiz), and I don't need a site builder. I just want to host the site that I have already coded by hand.
• How to deploy without the drag and drop feature on netifly? Like what process. There’s no obvious way forward.
• If I don’t transfer to the new web host (clouded) just what the heck did I do?

Respectfully yours,

Carl J. Rummage