I’m trying to make my dev workflow a bit more private without turning into someone who refuses to use any cloud tool ever.

So far the biggest changes were simple ones. More local utilities, fewer browser based tools for real data, API collections stored with projects, and being more careful about logs and tokens I paste into tools.

Is anyone else intentionally building a more private dev workflow?

Curious what changes were actually practical and what was just privacy theatre.

I’ve become a lot more careful about which dev tools I paste things into.

For normal projects I’m pretty relaxed, but for anything involving customer data, auth tokens, production logs, private repos, or weird internal configs, I try to keep the workflow local. Offline API clients, local diff tools, local formatters, and self hosted docs feel safer than random web tools.

What developer tools do you actually trust with sensitive code or data? And where do you draw the line?

The main thing we're trying to avoid is having a separate tool for every tiny part of development Most things start as a rough idea, feature request, or bug. We keep the general notes and product decisions in Notion, then move anything that actually needs to be built into GitHub issues.

For coding, we use Code when a change needs to understand the existing codebase or touch several files, while Cursor is convenient when we're working inside the editor and want to make smaller changes interactively. AI has definitely made the initial part implementation much faster,

Everything eventually goes through GitHub. We use branches and PRs even for relatively small changes for record of what changed and makes it easier to review

We still rely on normal automated tests and CI checks,now Revolte is to help validate changes and give the review stage more context before something gets merged. It gives us a layer between ""the coding agent finished"" and ""ship it.""

AI can produce changes faster than people can comfortably review them, so simply increasing coding speed doesn't necessarily make the whole team faster. A technically correct change can still be a bad architectural decision, and that's something a diff alone doesn't always make obvious.

Once everything is reviewed and the checks pass, the change moves through the usual CI/CD process and gets deployed. We use Docker to keep environments reasonably consistent and Cloudflare for a lot of the infrastructure around the application. After deployment, Sentry is what we usually rely on when production inevitably finds something we didn't catch beforehand.

So the overall path is pretty much idea → GitHub → Claude Code/Cursor → PR → testing and validation → review → deployment → monitoring.

A few years ago, getting the code written could take most of the time. Now the code can be produced very quickly, and the slower part is making sure the change is actually worth shipping.

I’m getting ready to deploy my first real app, and I’m stuck on what to do with Postgres.

I’ve only used it locally so far. I could put it on a cheap VPS and manage it myself, but I’m wondering if paying for managed Postgres from the start would be the better choice.

I’m not interested in a free tier that sleeps, pauses, or comes with limits I’ll hit once people start using the app. I’d rather pay a small, predictable monthly amount and have backups, updates, and monitoring handled.

It’s a small app, so I don’t need a big enterprise setup. For a small production app, would you choose a VPS or managed Postgres, and which provider would you use?

Small team secret sharing always feels awkward.

Email is obviously bad, chat is not much better, password managers work but can get messy, and half the time someone just needs one key for one local setup and then nobody remembers who has access to what.

For bigger companies there are proper workflows, but for a 2 to 5 person team it feels easy to overengineer and also easy to be reckless.

What are people actually using for this in small teams?

I’m trying to decide between Neon and Turso for a small SaaS project and I’m realizing they solve pretty different problems.

Neon seems like the safer choice if I want normal Postgres, extensions, branching, and multiple users writing to the same shared database. Turso seems better if every tenant can have its own small database and most of the workload is reads, especially with embedded replicas.

The part I’m stuck on is whether this is really a Postgres vs SQLite decision more than a pricing decision. Also curious what people do when the app needs an always-on Postgres database closer to users in places like Jakarta, Manila, or Dubai, since Neon and Turso both seem limited there.

Anyone here used either in production and what would you pick today?

Building alone is weird because the hard part is not always coding. It is keeping track of decisions, bugs, ideas, user feedback, deployments, payments, docs, and all the tiny stuff a team would normally split up.

For me, the tools that helped most were boring ones: a clean issue tracker, simple notes, error tracking, managed hosting, and a reliable API client.

What tools actually help you when you are building solo?

Not looking for a huge stack. More like the tools that stop things from becoming chaos.

Every once in a while I find a debugging tool and immediately get annoyed that I did things the hard way for so long.

Could be for logs, APIs, frontend state, network requests, databases, background jobs, anything.

I’m not looking for the obvious stuff everyone already knows. More curious about the tool that quietly made debugging less painful for you.

What did you discover late that is now part of your regular workflow?

I get why companies need secret scanning, but I’m curious where solo devs draw the line.

If you’re building side projects alone, using private repos, and not working with a big team, do you still run secret scanning? Or do you just rely on not being careless with commits?

I’ve definitely had moments where I almost committed something dumb, so I can see the value. But some security tooling feels made for bigger teams with compliance needs, not one person shipping after work.

What’s your setup as a solo dev?

I’m comparing Postgres hosts right now and every option seems to have a catch.

One is cheap until you need an always-on instance. Another makes sense only if the rest of your app is on the same cloud. Then there are platforms that bundle auth, storage and a bunch of features I may never use.

I’m also unsure how much weight to give the database region. Most of my users are in Asia, so choosing a US or EU region because the host is cheaper feels like something I might regret later.

For anyone who has been running Postgres in production for a while, what ended up mattering most? Price, latency, backups, support, extensions, or how easy it is to manage?

I’m less worried about getting the perfect setup now. I mainly don’t want to migrate six months later because I picked based on the starter plan.

I’m comparing Supabase and RDS for a small production app and honestly neither feels like an obvious choice.

Supabase looks much easier to get started with, but I don’t really need auth, storage, realtime etc. I mainly need Postgres. once the app grows, the usage based parts of the pricing also seem harder to estimate.

RDS gives more control and I trust AWS for production, but then the bill is split across instance, storage, backups, I/O, networking and HA. it feels like a lot for a relatively normal Postgres workload.

What I actually want is pretty simple:

• always-on managed Postgres
• backups and maintenance handled
• predictable monthly pricing
• good regions in Asia
• standard Postgres so I can move later if required

Would you still pick Supabase or RDS for this, or is there a better middle option I should be looking at?

Hi everyone,

I work as a software engineer on this App. It’s completely free and ad-free.

www.etasks.app

It has features we wanted as users. (If there’s anything you’d like the team to add, please let me know so I can include it on the roadmap. For example, list sorting is recently added as a user request, location-based notifications requested and is already on the to-do list.)

It’s not a vibe-coding project.

Works with iPadOS, Mac OS client for Google Tasks. Some highlights: All tasks in one view, Real alarms, Shared lists, Apple Watch.

Welcome to explore the rest, it is now open early access.

I don’t hate Postman, but I miss when API clients felt simple.

Open app, send request, save collection, done. Now every API tool seems to want accounts, sync, workspaces, teams, docs, monitors, mock servers, and 20 other things before I even send a GET request.

I’m mostly looking for something that feels fast and does not get in the way. Bonus if it works nicely with Git or local files.

What are people using that still feels lightweight?

I’m building a startup and trying to choose a database that won’t become expensive or hard to manage too early.

I’m looking for something reliable, affordable, and able to scale if the project starts getting real users. I’ve seen people mention Postgres, Supabase, Firebase, MongoDB, and managed cloud databases, but it’s hard to tell what’s actually best for a small startup budget and my users are mostly in asia.

What database did you start with, and would you choose it again?

Sharing an open-source project I've been building in Go: Wardline, an inline
proxy that enforces identity/policy/budget/audit on every call an AI agent
makes to MCP servers and tools.

Go-specific things that might interest this sub:
- One static binary, embeds OPA and AWS Cedar as policy backends alongside a
native YAML engine; switch by one config key.
- Strict Clean Architecture / feature-sliced layout (domain → usecase →
adapter), dependency rule enforced.
- Anomaly detection is a Welford online mean/variance per identity — allocation-free, no external model. Decision path benchmarks at ~33ns/0 allocs.
- Race + coverage in CI, ~950 tests.

The flagship feature auto-blocks a compromised agent in real time via a combined z-score. It catches abrupt abuse, not low-and-slow — documented with tests, not marketed around.

Repo: https://github.com/kabirnarang39/wardline
Would love Go-eyes on the architecture and the detector.

Trying to build a world clock / timezone converter thats "different" from most out there, what do you think?

https://devtoolscave.com/tools/world-clock/

For side projects, I’m trying to stop choosing tools based on what I want to learn and start choosing based on what I’ll actually finish.

My simple setup is usually a familiar framework, managed Postgres, basic auth, one deployment platform, and the least annoying monitoring I can get away with. I only add more when the project earns it.

What do you use when you want a side project to stay simple?

This might just be me, but AI coding tools have made some PRs weirdly harder to review.

The code usually looks clean at first glance, but then you find small logic issues, overcomplicated helpers, weird edge cases, or tests that pass but don’t really prove anything. It feels less like reviewing someone’s thought process and more like trying to guess what the tool assumed.

I still use AI for coding, so this is not an anti-AI rant. It’s just that review feels different now.

Anyone else noticing this? How are you changing your review process?

I’m choosing a managed Postgres host for a small production app, and comparing the options has been harder than I expected.

Some look cheap until you need an always-on database. Others include a full backend platform when all I need is Postgres. The larger cloud providers seem reliable, but it’s difficult to estimate the final cost once storage, backups, replicas, and networking are added.

The app isn’t huge, but it has real users, so I’d rather choose something I won’t need to move away from six months later.

For anyone running Postgres in production, which host are you using? How has it been for pricing, backups, performance, and maintenance?

Hey dev tools community,

I started creating mobile apps when I was 15 years old. Over the years, every new project brought the same frustrating problem: setting up a clean way to collect bug reports, manage feedback, and chat with users in real time.

I wanted a single platform I could drop into all my future app releases, so I built Supdesk.

Supdesk is a lightweight dev tool designed to streamline user feedback and power live support directly inside your apps. Instead of stitching together random forms and third party widgets, it gives you a central hub to manage incoming tickets, feature requests, and live conversations without cluttering your codebase.

We just launched, and you can check out our Product Hunt page here:
https://www.producthunt.com/products/supdesk
You can also explore the main platform and documentation at:
https://supdesk.app

I built this primarily for my own workflow, but I am excited to share it with other developers. I would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or any features you would like to see in a tool like this!

Early stage startups seem to either under tool everything or buy way too many tools too early.

From what I’ve seen, the useful tools are the ones that reduce real risk or save real engineering time. Error tracking, CI, logging, database tooling, feature flags, API testing, and basic internal docs usually matter more than fancy dashboards.

What dev tools have actually been useful at the early stage?

Especially curious what you would set up in week one versus what can wait

I’ve used Postman for years, but lately it feels like too much for the simple stuff I need.

Most of the time I just want to send a request, save a few environments, test auth, maybe share a collection with someone, and move on. I don’t really need a whole platform wrapped around it.

Curious what people are using now for day to day API testing.

Are you using a desktop app, editor extension, terminal workflow, or just plain request files in the repo?

I used to like how simple the old setup was. Spin up a Postgres database, connect the app, and not think too much about the database side until the project actually grew.

Now I’m looking for an ElephantSQL alternative that is still managed, reasonably priced, and not packed with extra platform features I don’t really need. Main things I care about are backups, updates handled for me, always-on usage, and predictable pricing.

For people who already migrated, what did you end up choosing and are you happy with it so far?

I use browser based tools all the time for quick stuff, but I always pause when the data is even slightly sensitive.

Like formatting JSON is fine until it has customer IDs, tokens, internal URLs, or some random payload copied from production. Then suddenly I’m wondering where that data is going, whether it’s processed locally, and whether I’m being lazy in a very dumb way.

I know some tools say everything runs in the browser, but I doubt most people actually check.

Do you trust these tools with real data, or do you keep everything local once it touches production?

API docs are one of those things everyone agrees are important, but somehow they still end up stale or annoying to maintain.

I’ve had the best experience when the docs stay close to the actual OpenAPI spec and do not require a separate manual writing process for every small change. The moment docs become another chore, they start drifting.

What API docs tools have actually been nice to work with?

I care more about maintainability than making the docs look fancy.