标签：#discuss

I am from Rajasthan(State), but because of my job, I am currently living far away from my home and...

I’ve been working on a desktop utility called Ripper, a Python + CustomTkinter app that downloads video and audio from supported sites (starting with YouTube). The app itself has been a bit rough to build and maintain — but distributing it has been the annoying part. GitHub won’t host my repository, let alone the EXE, due to there size and I don’t want to rely on sketchy file hosts or temporary mirrors. So I finally figured out a temporary setup that’s stable and easy for users to follow. This post explains the distribution workflow and why I’m using it. Why I’m Using this Approach The EXE and source code are too large to push to GitHub, even when the ffmpeg EXE is zipped, and one of my main goals is that I don't want the user to have to hassle with getting ffmpeg. So, I set up a public Google Drive folder where users can get the zipped EXE file and use the app right away. But I want to emphasize that there’s nothing malicious. Google Drive Hosts the EXE Google Drive ended up being the simplest reliable host. It gives me: A clean public link No ads No expiration No weird redirects Instant updates when I replace the file Here’s the current download link: Download Ripper (Google Drive) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w6rMgCAcSEteAssXIGJmYHrtyPHY99tC/view This is the only official download source. GitHub Pages Hosts Everything Else Since GitHub Pages can host static content, I built a simple project page that contains: https://codebunny20.github.io/ The official download link Feature list Tech stack Build instructions Planned features Version notes Development updates This page is now the “home base” for Ripper. Any time I push a new version, I update the Google Drive file and update the GitHub Pages site with the new version info. It keeps everything centralized without relying on GitHub Releases. Why This Setup Works Better It’s not fancy — but it’s reliable. I can update the EXE instantly I can update the GitHub Pages site just as fast Users always have one clean,

Yesterday, I published a post titled "My Book 'AI, Ego & Regret' Paperback Is Live. Kindle Is...

Intro There's a pitch behind every AI coding assistant: it makes you faster. Fewer keystrokes, less boilerplate, more shipped features per sprint. The pitch is half true. What it leaves out is the gap between a tutorial demo and a real codebase under real pressure. In a demo, every suggestion is correct because the demo was built to make the suggestion look correct. In production, the assistant doesn't know your architecture, your team's conventions, or the ticket you're actually trying to close. It just knows what tends to come next in code that looks like yours. That gap is where the noise lives. The instant-accept trap Say a developer is mid-flow, wiring up a new endpoint. The assistant suggests a validation helper that looks reasonable, so they hit tab. It compiles, tests pass, they move on. Three weeks later a teammate finds two nearly identical validation helpers in the codebase: one written by a human eight months ago, one autocompleted last sprint. Nobody meant to duplicate logic. The suggestion was locally correct and globally redundant, and nothing about "correct code that compiles" caught that. (This is an illustrative scenario, not a specific incident, but most teams running Copilot or similar tools for more than a few months will recognize the shape of it.) Architecture creep, one suggestion at a time No single autocompleted line breaks your architecture. That's exactly the problem. An assistant trained on generic patterns will happily suggest a new abstraction, a new dependency, a new way of doing something you already do three other ways elsewhere in the codebase, because it has no visibility into "elsewhere." Accept enough of these one at a time and the codebase drifts into a dozen small dialects of the same idea, none of them wrong in isolation. The review tax The real cost isn't the code that's obviously bad, that gets caught. It's the code that's plausible enough to pass a quick glance and wrong enough to need real review time later. If you accept

Hey everyone! I bring you my development journey on what I have discovered, accomplishments for this...

👋👋👋👋 Looking back on your week -- what was something you're proud of? All wins count -- big or small...

July wasn’t a particularly pleasant month for me. I was affected by the restructuring of the company...

In remote software demos, the biggest problem is not always the product itself. Sometimes the audience simply doesn’t know where to look. A button may be visible. A setting may already be on screen. The presenter may be explaining everything correctly. But if attention isn’t directed clearly, people can still get lost. After doing a lot of screen sharing and software demos, I kept noticing the same small UX problems. 1. The cursor is visible, but not necessarily noticeable When you're presenting your own screen, you always know where your pointer is. The audience doesn’t. On a large monitor, a compressed video call, or a busy application UI, the pointer can easily disappear visually even though it is technically visible. This becomes especially obvious when you say something like: “If you look over here…” You know exactly what “here” means. The audience may need another second or two to find it. That delay sounds minor, but during a demo it can happen again and again. A presenter moves on to the next step while part of the audience is still trying to locate the previous one. 2. Moving the pointer is not the same as directing attention A common workaround is to move the mouse around whatever you want people to notice. I’ve done this many times myself. Circle the button with the cursor. Move back and forth over a chart. Quickly point between two settings. It works, but it also adds visual noise. Eventually I realized there are really two different actions happening: Navigation — using the mouse to operate the software. Attention — telling the audience where to look. During a demo, those aren’t always the same thing. Sometimes I don’t want to click anything or change the interface. I just want to say: Look here. 3. Highlighting something can interrupt the demo There are plenty of powerful screen annotation tools available. They make sense when you want to draw arrows, write notes, add shapes, or explain something in detail. But during a live product demo, switching int

Last post, I said "the book is under review." Now the paperback is live. The Kindle edition is...

Every hackathon has the same 90-second moment of dread: someone hands you a codebase you've never seen, and you have to make sense of it before the clock runs out. File trees don't help. grep doesn't help. You waste the first 30–60 minutes reading the wrong files, missing a hidden dependency, and stepping straight into a production trap nobody warned you about. In other words: before writing code, you spend half your time trying to figure out where the hell the code is. The idea wasn't "AI that writes your code." It was "AI that tells you where to look before you write it." For InnovaHack Chapter-1, my team built Waypoint — a dev onboarding platform. Point it at any GitHub repo or a local folder, describe a task like "Add a new global configuration flag to app.set()", and instead of you reading the whole codebase to figure out where that even goes, it hands you a Mission Brief : exactly which files you'll touch, the traps waiting in them, what to learn first, and the order to do it in. Waypoint made the Top 50 — one of the 50 chosen to advance to Round 2. Here's how it actually works under the hood, what it took to build, what's next for it — and since I don't believe in only posting the highlight reel, what happened after we placed that made us walk away from the next round. The problem: the cold-start tax Every time a developer joins a new codebase, or picks up an unfamiliar task in one they already know, there's a tax paid in wrong files read, missed dependencies, and traps hit blind. For me, that moment came when I wanted to contribute to Forem — the open-source project that actually powers DEV. I didn't know a line of Ruby on Rails, and between learning the language, understanding the framework, and preparing for interviews, I didn't have the time to read an entire unfamiliar codebase just to figure out where one feature belonged. I never ended up making that contribution. But the problem stuck with me. It's also a pattern for our team more broadly: we delibera

Recently, I built a mobile app with Expo; everything worked well with the development build on a simulator and a real device. Yet when I published the app to test the production build on a real device, it crashed without any explanation. With the crash, I had to get the crash report from Apple and download it to read it and try to understand the issue, yet even with that, I did not find any details that could help me, so I did what any normal guy during this age can do, I gave my code base to claude code and the crash report to anaylze them and tell me the issue. Guess what happened here? It hallucinated! Reading Claude's output made me feel I wasn't going in the right direction; for that reason, I had to go the old way: Stack Overflow and Reddit. Going to read the issues there helped me with three main extra things that AI does not provide: Knowing what other people tried: When I go to Stack Overflow or Reddit , I read the question, the thread, and other people's comments, even if it's not the correct one; this helps me get context, grasp the idea, and even learn some historical data about the issue. That might be the one I am facing. Sense of community: When I read other people's struggles and experiences, it gives me the feeling that I am not alone- not just me and a machine trying to prompt it to work- and it makes me feel that I belong to something bigger. It helps me keep up, not get frustrated, and feel that it's me who cannot solve issues with AI. Slow learning: Our brain does not remember the information when you read it once and forget it; we learn when we put effort and push the limits of our brain. With AI, this is getting easier by sending the question directly and getting the answer, so we forget even the issue if we face it again (spoiler alert: I had this exact issue a few months ago and forgot about it). That's why slow reading and similar methods help keep our brains alive and help us improve. With this, I am not saying to fully remove AI and not t

I'm part of an awesome community where senior devs, product managers, founders, and experienced folks from different domains discuss how they use AI and automation tools to boost productivity — without sacrificing real learning. The group is a goldmine . Tool recommendations. Automation workflows. Latest trends. Migration war stories. I've learned more from this group than from most tutorials. Last week, I needed to find something specific about running local LLMs. I searched with keywords. I scrolled. I found a whole lot of messages — but none of them answered my question directly. I still had to manually read through dozens of messages , open the links they shared, and try to piece together the context myself. It took me over an hour, and I wasn't even sure I'd found everything. Someone might say: "Just Google it." Or "Ask an LLM." But that defeats the purpose. The value here isn't just information — it's the context . The "this library is a game changer" comment only makes sense if you know what the person was working on before, and who else agreed or disagreed. That context is lost in scrollback. And I'm tired of trying to keep it all in my head . I've seen people send important links to themselves on WhatsApp. But that becomes a messy pile with no structure. No connections. No way to see how one message relates to another. So I'm curious: How do you deal with this? Have you lost important knowledge in group chats? Do you have a system for recovering it? Or are you also just scrolling endlessly? I have an idea I'm working on. But I'd love to hear your approaches first. Drop your thoughts in the comments — I'll document what I learn .

1. Crypto & Security Tools Crucial for authentication setup, payload verification, and security testing. JWT Parser / Decoder: Decodes JSON Web Tokens ( Header , Payload , and Signature ) without transmitting secret keys over the internet. Token & Password Generator: Generates cryptographically secure random passwords and API tokens with customizable character sets, lengths, and complexity rules. Hash Text Generator: Computes cryptographic hashes (MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512) for strings to verify integrity or check signature matching. Bcrypt Hash / Verifier: Hashes plain-text passwords or checks plain text against an existing hash using the bcrypt algorithm. UUID / ULID Generator: Creates universally unique identifiers (v4 UUIDs) or time-sortable lexicographically sortable unique identifiers (ULIDs). BIP39 Mnemonic Generator: Generates seed phrases and cryptographic keys used in wallet initialization and HD key generation. RSA Key Pair Generator: Generates public and private RSA key pairs directly in the browser for local testing of asymmetric encryption systems. Basic Auth Generator: Quickly constructs Authorization: Basic <base64> HTTP header credentials from a username and password. 2. Formatters & Prettifiers (Development) Saves hours when dealing with messy logs, API responses, or raw system configurations. JSON Prettify & Minify: Formats unformatted API JSON strings with customizable indentation or compresses them into a single line to reduce payload sizes. JSON Diff: Highlights additions, deletions, and structural changes between two JSON payloads. SQL Prettify: Formats raw SQL queries into clean, readable multi-line statements with capitalized keywords. YAML / XML Formatter: Cleans up indentation, validates structure, and formats raw XML and YAML files. Docker Run to Docker Compose: Translates single CLI flags ( docker run -d -p 80:80 ... ) into a structured docker-compose.yml file. Cron Expression Generator & Parser: Provides human-readable schedules from

Last month my WhatsApp stack moved 89,479 messages. I got no invoice for any of them. That is not a brag, it is the setup for an honest accounting. Because "self-hosting is cheaper" is the least interesting sentence in infrastructure, and it is usually said by someone who has never been paged at 7am by a bot that went quiet at 2am. I want to put a real number on both sides of that trade: the money Twilio would have charged, and the money self-hosting quietly takes back. All the numbers below were pulled or fetched on August 27, 2026 . The rate cards move quarterly, so check yours. The traffic, measured rather than estimated Five WhatsApp inboxes, bridged from WAHA into a self-hosted Chatwoot. Thirty days: messages Total 89,479 Inbound (from users) 45,563 Outbound (from us) 43,916 Most benchmarks stop here, multiply by a per-message rate, and publish. That answer is wrong, because Meta does not charge per message. It charges per template sent outside an open customer service window. Multiplying my full 89,479 by a template rate overstates the Meta line by about 3x. Multiplying just the outbound half still overstates it by about 1.5x. Since November 1, 2024 non-template messages are free. Since July 1, 2025 utility templates answering a user inside an open 24-hour window are also free. So the only line that costs money is the outbound message that goes out when nobody has written to you in the last day. Which means the number you actually need is not "how many messages," it is "how many outbound messages had no inbound message from that contact in the preceding 24 hours." The query that produces the real bill Here it is against Chatwoot's schema. It uses a window function rather than a correlated NOT EXISTS , because on a messages table of any size the correlated version will happily eat your connection pool. WITH src AS ( SELECT m . conversation_id , m . created_at , m . message_type FROM messages m WHERE m . inbox_id IN ( 27 , 23 , 46 , 50 , 48 ) -- your WhatsApp in

Keep the beams standing. Replace what they carry. — The 36 Stratagems, Replace the beams with rotten...

Introducing AI Disclosure on DEV: Tools for Nuance, Clarity, and Better Feeds Author leads by example using the new tag Ben Halpern Ben Halpern Ben Halpern Follow for The DEV Team Aug 26 Introducing AI Disclosure on DEV: Tools for Nuance, Clarity, and Better Feeds # showdev # announcements # ai # community 49 reactions 3 comments 3 min read

Two weeks ago I counted 204 guards in my repos and found that 89 % had never been shown they can...

Claude Code is amazing. It feels like cheating in the best way until it doesn't. The first time I dropped a vague comment and it gave me a fully working component, I was hooked. But somewhere along the way, I realized something weird was happening: I was coding less... and thinking less. Let’s talk about that. The Tools Got Better, But We Got Lazier In 2022, you still had to know stuff . Now? You just prompt your way through half the job. And sure, productivity skyrocketed. Ship faster, write fewer tests, scaffold full APIs in a couple of minutes. But here’s the tradeoff no one likes to talk about: we’re outsourcing thinking . Not tasks. Not code. Thinking. I've seen teammates slowly stop debugging on their own. They just throw the stack trace into Claude. I’ve seen people stop learning the fundamentals of async behavior or memory handling because “Claude will tell me.” Cool. Until Claude gives you a bad answer and you don’t realize it because you stopped building your intuition. The Industry’s Not the Same The layoffs? Brutal. And the worst part isn’t just losing a job it’s realizing you didn’t build portable skills . Because if Claude wrote all your code at your last job, what exactly did you learn? When companies trimmed down, they didn’t just cut bodies. They cut noise. They kept the people who could solve problems , not the ones who could Google fast or write perfect prompts. So ask yourself: if Claude disappeared tomorrow, could you still contribute? Using AI ≠ Being a Great Engineer I’m not anti-AI. I use Claude. I use Cursor. I use Copilot. But I don’t depend on them. There’s a difference between boosting productivity and becoming a prompt monkey. The first one makes you valuable. The second one… doesn’t. Let’s get real: code was never the point. It was always about solving problems, navigating ambiguity, simplifying complex systems, designing clean architecture. None of that goes away with AI. In fact, it becomes more important. The Skills You’ll Regret Not

Debian is polling its developers on how to handle AI-assisted contributions, with options that range from broadly permitting them to banning them outright. Whatever the outcome, I think this is one of the more consequential governance conversations in open source right now, and not for the reason the headlines suggest. The framing everyone reaches for is philosophical. Is generated code authored? Is it derivative? Does using a model make you less of a contributor? Those are real questions and I do not have confident answers to them. But if I imagine actually being a Debian maintainer, my problem is not philosophical at all. It is that my queue is full and my reviewing hours are finite. The bottleneck was never writing code Volunteer projects have always been constrained by review capacity, not by supply of patches. The scarce resource is someone knowledgeable enough to say "this is correct, this fits our conventions, I will own the consequences if it breaks." Assistants change the ratio between those two things dramatically. The cost of producing a plausible patch has fallen much faster than the cost of evaluating one. That asymmetry is the whole story. A project can absorb a lot of contributors when each contributor's output is roughly proportional to their understanding. It struggles when someone can submit a large, fluent, superficially reasonable change to a subsystem they have never read. I want to be careful here: plenty of experienced maintainers use these tools well, and their patches are better for it. The failure mode is not the tool. It is the decoupling of confidence from comprehension. Why detection is the wrong axis A ban sounds like a clean answer, and I understand the appeal. But I am skeptical it can be enforced in a way that means anything. You cannot reliably detect generated code, especially after a human has edited it, and especially for the kind of small idiomatic patch that makes up most of a distribution's traffic. A rule you cannot enforce d

Every so often a post reminds me that the most dangerous line of code in a system is the one that looks like it could not possibly be wrong. This week's version: calling .lower() on a string can be a security vulnerability. If your first reaction is skepticism, mine was too. Lowercasing is the plumbing of programming. We do it to normalize usernames, compare header names, canonicalize domains, and check things against blocklists. It feels like arithmetic. The problem is that case conversion is not a character-by-character mechanical operation. It is a linguistic one, defined by Unicode, and it has behavior that surprises almost everyone who has not been bitten before. Case is not symmetric, and not always local Two examples that break the mental model. Turkish has a dotless i, and correct locale-aware conversion maps between letters differently than English does, which means "the same" string can lowercase into two different results depending on locale settings. And there are characters outside ASCII whose lowercase form is an ASCII character, meaning a string that contains no k at all can become one that does after normalization. Sit with that second one for a moment, because it is the security-relevant shape. If you validate a string, then normalize it, you have validated something that no longer exists. Your check ran against one value and your system acts on another. That is the classic time-of-check versus time-of-use bug, except the mutation is not caused by an attacker racing you. It is caused by your own normalization call, quietly doing what the spec says it should do. I want to be careful not to overstate the specifics here, since the exact behavior depends on language runtime, Unicode version, and locale configuration. The generalizable lesson is what interests me. The pattern to look for in your own code Anywhere a string travels through this sequence, there is potential for trouble: Accept input. Check it against a rule: an allowlist, a blocklist, a com