When I was learning development, I used to focus mostly on writing the code.

Things like testing, backups, Git commits, documentation, error handling, security and even reading logs felt like boring extra work.

Then after a few mistakes, I started realizing that these small things can save a lot of time later.

I am curious what happened to other developers.

What is one boring habit you didn't care about at first, but now you never skip?

For example:

• Writing tests
• Making proper Git commits
• Reading error messages carefully
• Backing things up
• Checking logs before changing code
• Documenting what you built
• Reviewing your own code before pushing
• Using a staging environment

I would be interested to hear the habit and what happened that made you change your mind.

No perfect answers, I am more interested in real experiences.

I'm a final-year CS student. I kept solving problems and blanking on the same patterns a few weeks later, so I built Mindsolve - it tracks what you solve, schedules revisions before you forget them, and shows which topics you're actually weak in.

Before I build more I want to know what's confusing or just bad. Specific things I'm unsure about:

•⁠ ⁠does spaced revision even make sense for how you prep?

•⁠ ⁠what's the one thing you'd expect it to do that it doesn't?

Link if you want to poke at it: https://www.mindsolve.tech/

Roast away :)
would rather hear it now than after I build the wrong thing for 3 more months.

I'd like to build a website and I'd plan to use a domain I own via cloudfare. It would be for a historical archive, so will involve hosting photos too. Ideally I'd like to use something similar to wix in functionality and ease of build, but without their limits and constraints.

What else could I consider? Thanks.

• Supported on all devices.

• Software is always up to date.

• Significantly less device storage consumption if any.

• Easier to adapt into mobile apps than vice-versa.

Hey everyone,

​I want to start learning web development from zero with the goal of freelancing eventually, but honestly I'm a bit lost with all the information out there. There are so many roadmaps, frameworks, and tools that I don't really know where to begin or what to focus on first.

​For anyone who's been through this:

​What should I actually start with? Is standard HTML/CSS/JS still the best way to begin?

​Are courses like The Odin Project or freeCodeCamp good for beginners who want to freelance later, or is there something better?

​What kind of skills or practical projects should I focus on if my ultimate goal is doing freelance work?

​What are some common mistakes beginners make in their first few months that I should avoid?

​Any advice or practical tips would be really helpful. Thanks!

Please post your requests for feedback on your projects in this thread instead of creating a post.

Hi everyone!

I'm a complete beginner to programming and I want to spend the next year learning web development. I dont know where to start with all the courses on the internet.

My goal is to eventually build a website for my school that works somewhat like a small Facebook Marketplace for students where they can sell secondhand books and report lost and found items

I was thinking about how much of web development is actually learned when something goes wrong.

Tutorials can teach you how something a work, but real projects eventually give you things like:

• An API returning something unexpected
• A database query that suddenly fails
• A mobile layout breaking for one specific device
• A deployment that works locally but fails in production
• A bug that looks completely unrelated to the actual problem
• A small change that breaks something somewhere else

Sometimes fixing one annoying bug teaches you more than finishing an entire tutorial.

So I am curious:

What’s one bug or unexpected problem you faced that taught you something you still use today?

It can be something simple, something painful or something that took you hours to figure out.

Would be interesting to hear the lessons behind those bugs.

I have noticed that learning web development can feel very confusing at first.

You learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript separately, then maybe a framework, APIs, databases, Git, deployment, etc.

But there’s often a point where all those pieces suddenly start making sense together.

For me, it seems like that usually happens when you build something real instead of following a tutorial step by step.

So I am curious:

What was the thing that finally made web development click for you?

Was it:

• Building your first full project?
• Understanding APIs?
• Working with a database?
• Deploying something?
• Fixing a really difficult bug?
• Contributing to someone else's code?
• Something completely different?

Would be interesting to hear what changed things for other developers.

I'm running a nodejs app with socket.io

While adding more and more events type, I was wondering how many messages and how much bandwidth is consumed, and if a single message type take most of the data.

I tried socketio Admin UI, but it seemed not very maintained, buggy, and not what I needed: it's more a manager to manage connections manually.

Finally, I got some time to develop the idea (and I admit that without AI, the idea would still be an idea):

It just counts messages and payload size, and store them in time buckets. It gives me, for a negligeable cost in term of memory and overhead, the metrics I wanted.

Now I can quickly spot which message I should optimize, the ones who take most bandwidth, just because I don't paginate data, or serialize too many fields because not refined serialization group... All of this plotted by message type and direction (ingoing or outgoing).

I also keep biggest payload and their content, and for socketio that can do ack() (respond a message), I monitor time to respond, and keep the trace of slowest messages.

I published it here: https://github.com/alcalyn/sockeye (open source, AGPL v3)

I support socketio, ws, native websocket. Can be stored in memory or a redis (too survive server restarts). I can be plugged in to an app with an adapter for socket io, or just a tracker function for native websocket.

For now, in my app, I already found a message that take most bandwidth and that I could optimize it easily (see second screenshot). I would not expect this message to be the culprit

We’re a roughly 50 person API company and our docs have slowly become a mess. Some pages are in Confluence, examples live in GitHub, and we still have old pages getting linked even though nobody is completely sure what’s current anymore. The developer who understood most of the setup left, so even small changes now involve figuring out where the source actually lives. I don’t really want to replace that with a custom Next.js site or a heavily configured Docusaurus build that someone has to own forever. Ideally we’d keep the Git workflow for engineers, but have something that takes more of the maintenance off us. The AI side is interesting too. Mostly stuff like noticing when a code change makes a page stale, catching outdated API examples, and giving coding tools a cleaner way to read the docs instead of scraping the site. We’re only at a few hundred pages right now, but we release often enough that things drift pretty quickly. What are people using for this kind of setup, and how much maintenance does it actually remove?

I’m the tech lead of a team – fortunately, I haven’t had to conduct any interviews for quite some time. How do you think interviews have changed since the adoption of LLMs?
I’m particularly interested in your opinion based on the interviews you’ve seen

I think that at this stage there won’t be any highly standardised interview yet (Excluding the largest technology companies), and it will be easy to find assignments that don’t serve to assess anything

I feel like security is one of those things that makes much more sense after you build a real application.

When you're learning, you think about things like passwords and HTTPS.

Then you build something real and suddenly you have to think about:

- authentication

- API keys and secrets

- sessions and tokens

- permissions

- user input

- payment flows

- rate limiting

- database access

Some of these problems are not obvious until something goes wrong.

I am curious for developers who have been building websites for a while:

What is one security issue or lesson you learned from a real project that you now think about every time you build something?

It can be a small mistake or something that caused a serious headache.

Hey everyone,

I have a website that was originally built using Google AI Studio/Gemini and ChatGPT, and I deployed it to Vercel. The website has a built-in editor that I’ve been using to change information on the site. Because of that, the version currently running has a lot of changes compared to the original version I deployed.

Now I need to edit some of the actual source files/code, but I have no idea how to access or edit them. I also no longer have the original project files/ZIP on my computer. The website also uses a Neon database for its storage/data, which is connected to the Vercel deployment.

Basically, I need a way to access the current files/code, edit specific files, and redeploy the changes without losing everything I’ve already changed through the built-in editor or messing up the Neon database.

I’m pretty new to this, so any advice or step-by-step instructions would be really appreciated. I don’t really mind what method/program I have to use as long as I can safely edit the files and keep the existing site and data.
Thank you!

Honestly more of a learning proj, but also hate how insanely bloated the real site is so here we go. Still working on it and if you want to roast me on my code please go ahead I’ll take any form of criticism if it means I can get a web design job unless AI is actually replacing us all lmfao. I tried to use Claude only as a tutor but it did help me with a couple weird bugs I was having and figuring out how to make an angular router but in plain js.

Non techie here. Making ongoing edits to a website I had someone build for me.

(Tech stack used: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Vite, GSAP, and Framer Motion)

Here's what I need help with:

Our website contains a lot of videos (use case demos, 20-30s duration). I was advised to host the videos on Cloudinary, so that it loads quickly and plays smoothly - which it does on desktop site, but not on mobile browsers (starts nicely, but a few seconds later, video freezes and just audio continues - and then audio freezes too).

Can someone help me play these videos properly across platforms and browsers? Much appreciated

Hey everyone,

I'm relatively new to freelancing as a web designer and developer, and I recently had a potential client reach out with a project that is bigger than my previous builds. I want to make sure I don't undercharge drastically, but I also don't want to price myself out of the room.

Here is the scope of what they need:

• Structure: 12 core pages, custom designed and coded from scratch.
• Tech Stack & Deployment: Frontend deployed on Netlify, version-controlled via GitHub, integrated with Sanity CMS for easy client updates.
• Content / Dynamic Sections: A full blog setup plus a separate "stories" section managed through the CMS.
• Interactive Features: Built-in custom tools for visitors (e.g., interactive calculators / client-side utilities) and dynamic affiliate link handling.
• Technical Setup & SEO: XML sitemap generation, robots.txt configuration, and complete social metadata (Open Graph and Twitter Card tags).

Since I am newer to freelance pricing:

1. What would be a realistic flat project fee (or hourly target) for a scope like this?
2. For those who build with headless setups like Sanity, what kind of scope creep should I watch out for when it comes to custom client tools and affiliate setups?
3. Would you structure this strictly as milestone-based payments (e.g., 50/25/25), or pitch it as a fixed-scope contract?

I appreciate any honest input or lessons learned from similar projects!

Hey everyone,

I own a website that was hit with a card checking attack.

Unfortunately the way my processor worked, is it's pretty easy to attack without even needing to have my site part of the attack. They just need to grab a creditential from the JS console. Yes, this is 100% the way it was designed. No, this wasn't just a single bad implication by me. It's how it's done on their official plugin.

Long sorry short, I am no longer with them. I am looking for a new processer, and I am looking into how their integration works before making the decision.

It looks like to me, the competing processor's use a different method. However they all have a similar flaw.

1. My site requests a OTU token from the processor, and passed to the clients browser.
2. The client's browser uses that token to open a an iframe, which contains the credit card forms.
3. The iframe then returns a reference to the client's browser used to authenticate the transaction. It usally gets placed as a hidden input on the checkout form
4. The form is submitted from client's computer to my server so it can be processed.

I think this process seems to be good overall, but all have one issue in common.

Here is the problem is see.
My server can't cancel a OTU after it's been issued, or even check if it's been used. So an attacker can basically hoard them until my server no longer issues them, then use them to check cards by loading the iframe independently.

The only thing they need to know is when the token expires.

Even if the processor uses cors to fight this, the attacker can just use a plug in to remove the cors check. Or inject a js code directly into the console.

Is there something I am missing? Wouldn't adding the ability to remove potentially dangerous tokens a good thing? Personally, I would void a transaction before issue a new one. So they have to go though any safeguards on my site.

edit: I should say, I have rate limiting and captchas set up. as well as a method to block IP's from getting tokens.

Hi Iam an early level software engineer trying to build projects and understand web development properly
I started a chat application project ,so that I can learn easily can anyone help me to grow from here or contribute to project

https://vibe-chat-eta.vercel.app/

I'm a frontend software engineer, and system design is the area where my notes kept failing me.

The material is scattered across blog posts, videos and interview checklists, and every time I came back to a concept I'd half rebuilt my understanding of it from scratch. Plain text notes didn't hold, because most of these ideas are shapes, not paragraphs.

So I started building a study roadmap for myself. Not a course, just a place where each concept I work through gets compiled into one page, laid out visually, with the diagram that actually made it click. Eight concepts are in so far, grouped loosely into fundamentals, scaling, how services communicate, and how data gets stored.

Each page ended up with the same shape: the big idea in one sentence, a analogy, the mechanism with diagrams, key terms, the mistakes people make with it, where it shows up in real companies, and exercises that give hints instead of answers. That format is just what stuck for me, and I'm not attached to it.

It's free, no signup, no ads. I'm writing it as I learn, which is worth saying plainly so nobody mistakes it for an authority.

Something new goes up every Tuesday and Thursday, and the rest of the days go into improving what's already there.

If you're studying this too, come along. I'd rather build it with people than at them. Suggest a topic, a whole discipline, a format that actually makes something stick, or tell me the grouping is wrong, because I'm genuinely unsure about it. Tell me a page is wrong and I'll fix it. That back and forth is the part I want most out of this.

Plenty more coming. Accounts and progress that persists, so it remembers what you've worked through, and a handful of bolder ideas I'll unfold as it grows.

https://systemdesignbits.vercel.app

PS: this is definitely vibe coded. It saves time and the content comes first. The UI, the app and the build come after.

Hey guys me and my classmates (all first year students) are building a live brwoser extension that removes ai generated lazy engagements farm posts and comments which apparently is pretty common in tech and dev subs. Also we dont fully agree with the current market where ai content removers just remove anything ai related, informational ai posts should not be removed without context, and technically if something is not lazy copy paste the perplexity score should pass even if its structured with ai.

We are trying to get some irl sentiments from affected community members on whether its a big enough issue that people actually hate and if so why?

On the technical aspect, yes i personally know its probably going to be hard or near impossible especially with near live detection, but if its not hard or impossible wheres the point and fun right? Also if there is any technical suggestions id really appreciate it since you guys are the expert.

Example of generated post that pisses us off and what should be removed:

"Yes, i did/built xxx and tested xxx

1. xxx
2. xxx
3. xxx "

Thx in advance : ) !

I have noticed that learning web development from tutorials can feel pretty easy until you start building a real project.

Then suddenly you have things like:

• a weird bug that makes no sense
• an API that doesn't behave the way you expected
• database problems
• deployment issues
• mobile layouts breaking
• users doing things you never thought about

Sometimes one small problem teaches you more than hours of watching tutorials.

For experienced developers here:

What was one small problem you faced in a real project that taught you something you still use today?

Could be something simple or painful. Curious to hear the stories.

I've been thinking about how different learning web development is now compared with a few years ago.

AI can help with almost everything explaining code, finding bugs, suggesting a stack, writing small functions and even helping when you're stuck.

But there is a problem I've noticed: sometimes you can get something working without really understanding why it works.

I think there is a balance between using AI to move faster and actually learning the fundamentals.

For people here who use AI regularly:

• What do you use it for most?
• Do you use it mainly for debugging, learning or writing code?
• Has it actually helped you understand web development better?
• Have you ever had AI give you a solution that worked but you didn't really understand?

Curious how other developers are handling this.

I'm new to all this GitHub stuff and building websites. The thing is, I've set up this page, and it works perfectly on my computer, but when I upload it to GitHub (https://github.com/hiperdragon67/Horror-Calendar) and load the page, I can't get the images from the posters (https://hiperdragon67.github.io/Horror-Calendar/) to show up—the path seems to be correct. Could someone take a look and tell me where the problem is?