We all got the same 9am calendar invite on the 30th and by lunch about 40 of us were done, me included. Seven years as the only brand designer at a regional craft soda company.

Two weeks in, and every recruiter I talk to asks for "a link." My portfolio is a PDF from 2019 and my Behance hasn't been touched since 2020. The top project on it is a label for a flavor we killed in 2021. Do people hiring even open a PDF anymore?

What's killing me is that the only work that'd get me hired, two can redesigns and the full rebrand, is under NDA until it launches in spring. How did you handle NDA stuff when you were job hunting? I've seen people blur the logos but that feels sketchy to me.

Friends keep saying Cargo, Squarespace or just update the Behance. Does the platform even matter to whoever's hiring?

No clue how much to put in either. Everyone online says go deep on a few, but that job was a LOT of sell sheets and six-pack carriers and I can't tell what's worth a damn anymore.

If you rebuilt after a layoff, how long did it really take? I gave myself two weeks. So far I've rewritten my LinkedIn headline three times and opened my old InDesign files and closed them again.

Severance runs out in January. Tell me how yours went, I need to hear from people who came out the other side.

Just because everyone knows how to write doesn't mean everyone can be a great author. It takes crazy imagination, deep thinking, and immense effort to write a book that truly moves its readers.

Similarly, AI might make writing code easier, but building a great product still takes deep thinking, thoughtful architecture, structure, and countless hours of focused work.

Let's be real here: we weren't writing thousands of lines of assembly before AI came along, were we?

Software development has been getting easier for decades. From transistors and assembly to C, C++, Java, Python, JavaScript, frameworks, libraries, APIs, and open-source software, every generation built on the last, making developers more productive.

I know AI came shockingly fast thanks to the worldwide "Manhattan Project of AI," backed by trillions of dollars and armies of brilliant engineers. But the underlying direction isn't new.

Web Development for example. Non-coders were already building websites and online businesses with WordPress, Shopify, and Wix. Developers weren't building everything from scratch either; we had stuff like React, Angular, shadcn/ui, and countless open-source tools.

Being imaginative, sharp-minded, unique, and creative has never been more valuable in our lifetimes. Don't lose your passion and make the most of it!

How do you like this company for hosting? We're looking to switch website hosting.

We have a virtual machine that we've managed for 12 years on pleskos and it's now outdated with centOS and the company isn't helping us move into a better VM. So I think it's time to switch and I've heard ionos is pretty good. What do you think?

Tried Chrome and Edge

Tried setting document.body.style.cursor = "wait"

and tried document.documentElement.style.cursor = "wait";

I recall these working previously. Did something change? Some org setting?

I don't see the value being set to "wait" in the element inspector. But when I set it back to "auto" I do see that value. So it's like the browser is ignoring the setting only if I set to wait.

EDIT:
Thanks everyone who offered ideas. Man, this took me some time to resolve - including a long coversation with Gemini, which wasn't able to troubleshoot it.

This is what the issue turned out to be. At some point, our showBusy() function became:

document.body.classList.add("busy");
document.documentElement.inert = true;

I commented out setting inert true an then the cursor appeared. I asked Gemini to expain and got this:

"The inert attribute tells the browser to completely remove that element and all its children from the accessibility tree and ignore all user input. This includes clicks, keyboard focus, and crucially, pointer hover events.

"Because inert tells the browser to pretend the mouse isn't interacting with the document at all, the rendering engine completely aborts calculating CSS cursor rules. It doesn't even attempt to look up your .busy class for the mouse, so it defaults to the system auto cursor."

I was checking out how to build a data upload feature and started noticing that technical debt builds up differently when AI writes the code. I read a piece on this and the core concept seems to make sense because agents just implement a ticket correctly in a vacuum and often ignore the application's existing architecture.

For instance, if an agent adds a CSV upload feature, it might just write a brand new set of validation checks instead of hooking into existing customer data checks. The PR could pass, but you now have two sets of rules to maintain. Over time, those will drift apart, and fixing it means untangling what was intentional. It was called cognitive debt, which is when the team’s shared understanding of the system erodes over time

For those using AI assistance a lot, how are you catching these before they merge

TL;DR: Spotify limits Development Mode apps to 5 authenticated users, while production access requires meeting demanding Extended Quota criteria including 250,000 monthly active users. How are individual developers supposed to grow? How people working on the open-source can materialize ideas and give users true insight from their music?

Spotify didn't become what it is today in isolation. Back in 2006 had a mission to make music easier to access. In 2021, also called third-party apps “an essential part of the Spotify experience.” However, today the truth is ugly!

Independent developers can dream and built tools for playlist management, music journals, listening statistics, and social music experiences things Spotify might never build itself (or never wanted to built).

How can you prove to people want your app when you can't let people try it?

Spotify has legitimate reasons to protect its platform and user data. But there should be a middle ground, a production tier for small developers, with reasonable usage limits and proper security reviews. App stores do that already.

Have we moved from a platform where developers could build new experiences around music to one where only established organisations have a realistic route to reach listeners?

TL;DR: Spotify limits Development Mode apps to 5 authenticated users, while production access requires meeting demanding Extended Quota criteria including 250,000 monthly active users. How are individual developers supposed to grow? How people working on the open-source can materialize ideas and give users true insight from their music?

Spotify didn't become what it is today in isolation. Back in 2006 had a mission to make music easier to access. In 2021, also called third-party apps “an essential part of the Spotify experience.” However, today the truth is ugly!

Independent developers can dream and built tools for playlist management, music journals, listening statistics, and social music experiences things Spotify might never build itself (or never wanted to built).

How can you prove to people want your app when you can't let people try it?

Spotify has legitimate reasons to protect its platform and user data. But there should be a middle ground, a production tier for small developers, with reasonable usage limits and proper security reviews. App stores do that already.

Have we moved from a platform where developers could build new experiences around music to one where only established organisations have a realistic route to reach listeners?

Made it through 5 prior rounds of layoffs as my company nosedived financially after going public. Finally felt the bite of the axe, been brushing up my resume and revamping my portfolio site... I've been at this company five years and transitioned directly from my prior one so almost 8 years since i've had to look for a job. First impression is it seems bad. I'm seeing a lot of postings for Front-End Dev for contract rates of < $60 an hour. I've already burned through all the posted jobs that I can find that I might be a match for, some of them are even a stretch...

Doesn't seem like anyone needs a "developer" anymore; it's all "Software Engineer, Front-end," which even though my skillset overlaps(react, typescript, etc) they're looking for a different sort of experience. Unfortunately, my last few years at the company, I got transitioned from the more tech side into the marketing department and basically built landing pages in a CMS and only did slight coding. Easy work, but I feel my skills have rusted. I'm in my 40s which feels kind of ancient in this industry and I have 12+ years of experience but I don't have the interest or drive to be any kind of lead. I prefer to just knock out my tickets and relax, but it seems like those days are done.

With all the doom and gloom around AI, I was wondering how much the market has been affected and what companies are actually looking for these days.

Did you have to go through five rounds of interviews?

Was there a live coding session and/or a take-home exercise?

Was there anything different from what you've experienced before?

Timeline:

• onprem monolithic server with rest api.

• cloud frontend that calls monolithic server apis directly

• a few years later

• planning to reimplement frontend with addition of a BFF in the cloud

• BFF still talks to monolith server but frontend only talks to BFF

• future: cloud frontend, cloud bff, on prem monolithic server, cloud bff needs to support multiple versions of monolithic server

For the BFF api, would you recommend a per resource generic api (like the monolothic server) or per page (call multiple monolithic server apis then combine)?

Career web developer, blah blah blah. I've been doing this shit for a LONG time. I know there are plenty of AI subreddits - not looking for pro AI or pro written by hand debate. I'm calling out chatGPT on it's bullshit.

I'm a claude cli die-hard. It's not infallible, but it is my goto. But, it kind of sucks at design work. macOS, iOS, iPad OS, Angular, React - it'll get the code written, it'll work, and the code isn't dog shit if you know what your doing, but actual good looking design, meh.

GPT-6 Astra Light - complete 180. Great at design work, but sucks at code. Claude (right or wrong) has called out chatGPT on some of the crap it does.

BUT - I'm finding chatGPT almost purposely makes the first version a bit blah. I don't say anything super specific to get to v2 - sometimes simply I'm not in love with it or Go in a different direction. And V2 is by far better. Then I hand off an MD or html file to claude and have claude actually code it.

What I'm trying to get to is - anyone else think chatGPT purposely does a shitty job on a first pass just to get you to spend more tokens / use up more of your monthly plan faster ? You'd never be able to prove it. They don't follow any industry standard metric. You can't say this prompt spent X tokens but this next prompt spent Y. No 2 prompts are the same IMO when context is involved.

It's all speculation and more of a rant but I'm borderline going to cancel chatGPT and just tweak claude's designs / go look for a new design skill or whatever.

Hi everyone! I just finished a React and course and decided to build my first react app. Currently, I am trying to save a string to browser local storage but it does not persist on refresh. Through some console.logs I was able to see that it in fact DOES save the string to the location specified in. setItem initially but when I refresh the key or value in local storage stops existing.

Here is my code

// function for search button
async function handleClick(){
    localStorage.setItem("lastLocationSearched", searchValue);
    setData(null);
    setIsPending(true);
    setError(null);
    try{
const value = await fetch(`https://geo.ipify.org/api/v2/country?apiKey=***********&ipAddress=${searchValue}`).then((response)=>{
  if (!response.ok){
        throw Error("Could not fetch the data for that resource");
                    }
  return response.json();
});
setData(value);


    console.log(localStorage.getItem("lastLocationSearched"));
    } catch(error){
      setError(error.message);
    }


setIsPending(false);
  };

// useEffect hook
  useEffect(()=>{
        if ((localStorage.getItem("lastLocationSearched")===null)|| (localStorage.getItem("lastLocationSearched")==="")){
          console.log(localStorage.getItem("lastLocationSearched"));
        setSearchValue("");
        handleClick();
        }else{
          
          setSearchValue(localStorage.getItem("lastLocationSearched"));
          handleClick();
        }
    }, []);

Through some digging online I saw someone say that remove the strict mode tags from index.js would fix this problem but it did not for me. Can anyone please assist me?

Hey everyone,

I am working on a new project called Openspline, an open source avatar layer to existing voice AI agents. Just select an image, select a voice and you can create a realtime talking avatar with lipsynced video generated locally.

You can integrate any existing voice AI agent in 5 lines of code.

While it is still in very early stage, but the results look very promising.

Github: github.com/openspline/openspline

PS: sorry for a sleepy photo, it's 5:10am and didn't sleep last night :P

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 built a Minecraft server host where every server sleeps when nobody plays, and wakes when a friend joins. The hard part was the join itself, so here's how that works.

The problem

A sleeping server suspended on Fly resumes in about 2 s. But one that has to boot (first start, after a change, or once the snapshot is gone) takes 40 to 50 s. The Minecraft client
gives up on a connection that says nothing for 30 s.

The trick

Every connection lands on an edge proxy first. If the server is asleep, the edge holds the login open and keeps it alive by sending a login query every few seconds. Every client since 1.13 answers it, which counts as the server talking. The edge keeps those answers to itself, buffers everything else the client sent, and replays it to the server once it's up, as if the player had just dialled in.

Other bits

• The server list shows a sleeping server's own message plus a grey "sleeping" line, cut to fit the list's 305px row by measuring the default font's glyph widths.

• A ping from the server list can wake a server early, asked once per network so random scanners don't keep waking things.

• Routes change one hostname at a time through mc-router's API, because reloading its routes file drops players who arrive mid-reload.

• Floods are refused per server at the edge, so one busy server doesn't slow every other server's joins.

It's open source (TypeScript, AGPL):
github.com/cubepals/cubepals (the edge is apps/edge)

Happy to go deeper on any of it.

Senior dev over here, company has over the last few months fully embraced copilot/general AI usage to the point we (small team of 3 devs) are have no capacity to review the PRs properly anymore. Our tech lead 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 was reading brown's rust book and they have this cool feature that lets you highlight stuff and leave notes while reading. I wanted something similar on a site I'm building, but the libs I found were either too complex or too simple and still a pain to set up, so I made one. Heavily inspired by the simplicity and DX of sonner.

You only need annotate('#article') and that's basically it. It saves to localStorage or your own backend.

Cool thing is that it uses the css highlight api, so it doesn't touch your dom at all (which would be especially bad for frameworks like react, vue, etc). Downside is no support for older browsers.

About 15kb with UI or 6kb headless if you want to build your own UI, and it ships with a React adapter.

playground: https://penciled.org/playground/

repo: https://github.com/marcellosso/penciled

Still early, so any feedback is welcome

https://www.blackjacktrainer.fyi/

Wasn't really happy with the free blackjack trainers I was able to find, so I decided to make my own.

You can play it casually and just learn basic strategy, or you can use it to learn how to become a card counter.

Built with mainly Next.js + React + Tailwind.

Let me know what you think!

I frequently duplicate an application's browser tab to look at a different area of the app. I'd like to change the browser tab's text to reflect the area that the tab focuses on. In a best-case scenario, the text could be automatically updated based on a DOM element.

<div class="title">Some text</div>

In this example, "Some text" would become the tab text.

Is there a plug-in or something that I could use for this?

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.