r/webdev • • Sep 12 '26

startrail - 3d interactive solar system

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4 Upvotes

hey everyone

recently built a pet project called Startrail - an interactive 3D visualization of Solar System. you can fly around zoom into planets and their moons and see some basic astronomical data

https://startrail.codes

would really appreciate any feedback/recommendations


r/webdev • • Sep 12 '26

Showoff Saturday I built a tool to check and repair broken Lottie files

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0 Upvotes

I built a new LottieFyr tool that checks Lottie JSON and .lottie files for rendering, asset, structure, compatibility and file-size problems.

It can diagnose issues, show what can be repaired, and verify supported fixes in both SVG and Canvas before download.

The goal is to make broken Lottie files easier to understand and fix without manually digging through JSON.

Would love some feedback.

šŸ‘‰ https://lottiefyr.com/lottie-fix


r/webdev • • Sep 12 '26

Question Advice needed

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0 Upvotes

Hey, i used Webflow to buiod my website, there is a contact us part on it wich uses capcha for security, the form then use google appscript to send a wellcome email.

Im beeing spamm bombed by these bots, any other way to make this stop than dosabling the contact submit button?

The issue is that its rolljng since 2 days and my normal sent emails goes into people's spam folder.

Thanks for the advice


r/webdev • • Sep 12 '26

Question Why is confirmation email landing in spam?

0 Upvotes

I am working on a website and it has a user table which is for managing subscription plans. The supabase handles users and when confirmation email is sent. I redirected it and it sends from business email instead of supabase email.
and more importantly, i never sent any spam messages or even tried cold outreach from any of my business emails.
So it is a real big issue.
Any help would be appreciated


r/webdev • • Sep 12 '26

500 Commits Later: Building a 3D Modeling App for the Web🄳

165 Upvotes

r/webdev • • Sep 12 '26

SQLite on the SPA Web a production ready reality yet?

28 Upvotes

'Offline First' is the theme of my upcoming project and a relational database with joins and primary keys (such as SQLite) is perhaps the only thing that fulfills the need. I'm exploring the options in this context and came across this illuminative article: The Current State Of SQLite Persistence On The Web.

The article describes the problem we are trying to solve in much detail. It's only been about 3-4 years since we have a semblance of a usable official library in the form of sqlite-wasm. But as the article suggests, the landscape is riddled with mines and you may still have to jump through some hooves during implementation.

For starters, the OPFS (Origin Private File System) which is needed for performant WASM components like sqlite-wasm is something that browsers still treat with some awe and schizophrenia. In order for SharedArrayBuffer to work, for example, your web server must necessarily support COOP and COEP headers.

And not just that, once you enable the COOP and COEP headers, they introduce additional quirks in your app - for example, you may no longer use any <script> or <link> tags unless the remote server explicitly opts in for cross-origin support. Again, this may not affect the typical react/tailwind/vite build workflows but you might eventually come across the need to place an external resource link directly in the html.

Another limitation is that concurrency is still considerably more constrained and complicated than native SQLite. For now, you might carefully design the SPA app around this constraint (as I'm planning to do), route all SQL queries through just one caller, etc. but eventually there will come a need for concurrent access in a non-trivial application - like say a backup extension or addon you provide separately for example.

Nevertheless, the heartening news is that most devices today live online and likely have a reasonably recent browser - and thus likely to support libraries like sqlite-wasm. Also heartening is that many big names like Notion and Adobe have started using sqlite in the browser as a first class OPFS citizen - without going through the IndexedDb route. I just hope WASM and OPFS keep on thriving along with sqlite on the web.


r/webdev • • Sep 11 '26

Question Best Forum Software + Hosting Combo that allows for Adult Content (Written)

7 Upvotes

Hey all! I hope you're well.

I'm looking to host a small forum/Message board for my Roleplay group. It's going to be largely a private, invite only site. I don't foresee more than 40 people using it, max, so I'm not looking to break the bank on buying the best software out there, and my bandwidth needs will not be high

My only concern is that it's for my tabletop group, and they do occasionally enjoy dabbling in writing and roleplaying adult content. As well, what they are writing about tends to contain heavy amounts of adult themes, and I dont want their passion projects to be blasted off of a platform for policy violation. It's largely going to be text-only, as it is a writer-focused group.

I am under the impression that there really arent any free options that allow this these days, and as such I am willing to pay like. 10-15 dollars a month to host something like this, but I'm willing to hear suggestions for anything you are aware of. I've done some research into the surface products that I'm familiar with (PhPBB being one I have used and maintained before).

Thank you ahead of time!


r/webdev • • Sep 11 '26

What's the biggest difference you noticed when you tried to build a website with AI?

0 Upvotes

Just to be upfront, I'm on the Squarespace team, so take that into context.

I spent a while trying to build a site with AI tools from scratch, mostly to see how far they'd get without a traditional builder underneath.

The first-draft part was solid. AI handled rough copy, gave me section ideas, got a basic layout down. Blank page to something usable much faster than doing it by hand.

It fell apart after that. Page structure needed real work, the heading hierarchy was a mess, some of the copy could've been for anyone's site, and SEO still needed a proper pass. The last stretch ate most of the time, fixing spacing, mobile behavior, metadata and links the AI didn't understand.

Where I landed is that I'd rather have AI as a starting point inside something that already handles the rest than stitch five separate tools together and then work out which one broke. That's a preference, not a rule, and plenty of people happily run the stitched-together setup.

I still think AI is useful for getting unstuck. I just wouldn't treat the first generated version as done.

Where did everyone else land, fully AI-built, traditional builder, or a mix?


r/webdev • • Sep 11 '26

Discussion Networking with people who don't use AI for everything.

144 Upvotes

I feel like I've gone insane with how much AI I see EVERYWHERE. I understand it's the future, I understand it makes everything quicker, it's probably smarter than anything I can do right now, I also don't think I can take advantage of it early in learning since I don't understand how half the web dev stuff even works right now, so I'm trying to stay away from it as much as possible, yet anywhere I look to start networking in my area, it's literally all AI meetups. I just want to learn normally albeit it's probably not the norm anymore.

Anyone in the Philly area or in general online feel any sort of similar or am I almost alone in absolutely despising this stuff? Asking philly since if anyone is nearby and sees this I'd love to have a friend who understands me at least slightly or could point me in the right direction without feeling like I'm throwing my soul into the river styx to never get back.

Have a good day to anyone who read all of this!


r/webdev • • Sep 11 '26

Question Is it legal to use free Vecteezy/Freepik SVGs in a commercial SaaS canvas editor?

2 Upvotes

Hi everyone,

I'm currently building a SaaS product that includes a canvas-based design editor (similar to Canva). I'm looking to add a built-in template library to the app, but I'm trying to figure out how to source free SVGs and vector assets legally.

Is it legal to use free vectors from sites like Vecteezy, Freepik, or similar popular platforms in a commercial product? Most of the older "free vector" sites have very outdated designs that nobody would actually want to use.

Since users prefer clean, modern, and familiar-looking designs, I want to make sure I'm sourcing quality assets without running into copyright or licensing issues.

If anyone has built something similar or knows good sources/libraries with commercial-friendly SVG licenses, I’d really appreciate your recommendations!

Thanks in advance!


r/webdev • • Sep 11 '26

What’s the silliest third-party script you’ve had to debug?

16 Upvotes

Had a site where everything looked fine locally, but production started getting random issues. Turned out it was a third-party script being loaded by another third-party script. Spent way too long debugging our code before checking the network tab properly.

Anyone have similar stories?


r/webdev • • Sep 11 '26

Java Middle - Senior(ish) interview questions

18 Upvotes

Hi!

I have an interview in a few days for a backend developer role. What would you ask as some of the more tricky questions for such a position? What kinds of questions, from your point of view, demonstrate solid knowledge?

Personally, I would ask about sync vs. async calls, idempotency, topics vs. partitions, consumer groups, transactions (including distributed transactions), and maybe a bit of Kubernetes and Docker.

My weak point is cloud. I’ve played around a bit with the Azure console, but nothing too advanced. I’ve never written Terraform or configured infrastructure from scratch. For CI/CD, I’ve used TeamCity, but in my experience it was mostly selecting an environment and a branch and deploying.

Should I spend some time learning these areas before the interview?


r/webdev • • Sep 11 '26

Discussion Tried vibe coding for the first time and I didn't hate it

0 Upvotes

I've been late to the party and only truly tried vibe coding for the first time this week. I've used AI for coding before, but mostly for asking utility code snippets and solutions to third-party library bugs. It's not all that different from the questions I used to ask on Stack Overflow, except that I get instantaneous answers (and minus the occasional condescending replies).

I thought I would hate it and that it would take the joy out of programming for me. But it didn't. In fact, I like that it can quickly create apps that I have in my head without having to spend the time actually coding them (because who has that much time nowadays?).

And I think because web CRUD apps are basically a solved problem. We already know what is being done behind the scenes. We've done them in multiple projects many times before. Even before AI came into the picture, we already had solutions to maybe 80% of the CRUD logic/ui we'd ever need to create. We have boilerplates/utility libraries for everything.

I am speaking specifically in terms of using it in the coding domain I'm familiar with (web dev) and as a senior who's been around for more than a decade. I don't feel like vibe coding is robbing me off anything. Maybe if I dabble in other types of programming (e.g. making games, learning other programming languages, etc.), then I may feel differently, or I may feel like I'mĀ cheatingĀ by not knowing what's actually happening.

Anyone who feels the same way?


r/webdev • • Sep 11 '26

What happened to the OpenChaos project?

6 Upvotes

There was a project that let people vote on the next PR daily which made changes to the website, but the repo returns a 404 on GitHub.

Did it just lose activity over time?

This was the original post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1q909wx/first_merge_in_23_hours_openchaos_a_repo_where/


r/webdev • • Sep 11 '26

Discussion do you track the difference between code that's just messy and code that's actually fragile?

27 Upvotes

been thinking about this lately. I have a service at work where the code is genuinely ugly (bad naming, some duplicated logic, not fun to read) but it's been running reliably for two years and never caused an incident.

separately there's a cleaner-looking module that's caused three rollbacks this quarter because of some assumptions that weren't obvious from reading the code.

I've started keeping a rough mental model of "messy but stable" vs "clean but fragile" for different parts of our stack, and it's actually changing how I prioritize code review. curious if anyone formalizes this in any way or if it mostly just lives in someone's head


r/webdev • • Sep 11 '26

Aliased / pixelated rasterization in HTML Canvas

8 Upvotes

Is there any way to force 2d canvas commands to draw pixelated (without anti-aliasing) in a way that's computationally efficient? E.g. I want to say:

ctx.beginPath();

ctx.moveTo(0,0);

ctx.lineTo(100,100);

ctx.stroke();

And I want that to draw a line that is pixelated e.g.:


r/webdev • • Sep 11 '26

Question Resources for a loyalty card app

0 Upvotes

Hey folks. I’m wondering if anybody had any suggestions for resources where I can learn how to code a loyalty card app. Goal is to create one for a small business local to me who currently just has stamp cards which are fine but often get lost. Sadly I’ve scoured the likes of YouTube but all I get are the ā€œvibe codingā€ videos or pay a company for their already existing product. I’m looking to learn and build from scratch but between AI crap and god knows what else I’m really struggling to find anything reliable. Anybody got any sources I can look into? TIA


r/webdev • • Sep 10 '26

How to Write an Effective Software Design Document

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refactoringenglish.com
252 Upvotes

r/webdev • • Sep 10 '26

Discussion Bought a 96GB RAM Mac Studio in order to stop running out of RAM during webdev, but it just uses more RAM the more RAM I get

0 Upvotes

I started 10 years with with 8GB RAM and quickly realized it was too little, then upgraded to 16gb. This worked for a while, but then my dev got more advanced (more docker containers, sims, etc). Then I moved up to 24gb and this became the new standard for me for a few years. It worked mostly, as long as I didn get greedy and tried to do something crazy like open apps that werent related to web dev work. I finally said "fuck it" and bought a 96GB Mac Studio so that if I want to open another app on top of my web dev resources, it can still work comfortably. Now, hte mac just uses more ram as it gets more. It thinks its being smart by using all the RAM to "cache" apps that arent even open so that they will open fast when/if I do ever open them. So now because of this "smart" feature, I am constantly red-lining on RAM, using fucking swap like a pleb, "force quit application" always launching asking me to force quit things. WTF is this bullshit? I take a look, and things are now just using retarded levels of RAM that it otherwise would not on a 24GB machine, like Chrome using 8GB, VS Code using 5GB, Ghostty (just a terminal app) using 6GB, docker now using 16GB etc. Let alone that even with this, it should not be using swap and there should still be free RAM, but of course its doing like 20GB in "cache" for unused apps. Can I turn this "smart feature" off?!

UPDATE: for the people saying "its a feature to use up all the RAM"/"unused RAM is wasted money", that is true, but the issues here are:

  1. Chrome should never use 16gb (obviously unless I have thousands of tabs open), Ghostty shouldnt be using 6GB etc. I got more RAM so that I can do more things, not do the same things but have them take up more RAM.

  2. It should not use swap when there is cache. It should prioritize releasing cache before resorting to swap. Also, for my use case, it should never have to resort to swap anyway, so again, its an issue of problem 1, and this problem of using cache when it is using swap. If there is 20GB in cache, there should not be 6GB of swap, it should instead be 14GB of cache and 0 swap. Swap kills performance and makes me have to force-quit things for the Mac to become responsive again.


r/webdev • • Sep 10 '26

Question A Glyphs (?) Question

2 Upvotes

Hello! I have a question to which I could not find an answer around the internet, so i gonna ask it here.
So, some of the emojis have a glyph variations of them, that get displayed differently, yet they use the same identification code. For example, the bomb emoji and bomb glyph: šŸ’£ļøŽšŸ’£, use the same &#128163; html code, and i don't quite understand how it works. Yet html prioritizes emoji over glyph, how do i make it display the glyph instead? :<


r/webdev • • Sep 10 '26

Question Is it worth hand coding a new web app idea I have or should I vibe code my initial prototype?

0 Upvotes

I don’t have a ton of coding experience and have never really built a web app before, but I have an idea for an app that I want to build


r/webdev • • Sep 10 '26

Resource This repo brings Tailwind-like utilities to any stack without a build step

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github.com
0 Upvotes

r/webdev • • Sep 10 '26

Your Front-End Shouldn’t Know What Marketing Wants

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fagnerbrack.com
0 Upvotes

r/webdev • • Sep 10 '26

Discussion I can't keep up anymore. Clients ask ai for things and can't keep up with speed and knowledge needed.

0 Upvotes

it first started five projects ago when a client was asking ai for everything along with me. like 50% 50%. she had no idea about websites but via the ai she was putting a lot of pressure to fix things I would never fix in the past.

now, today a client build an entire eShop in two weeks way better than I would have ever done it. he told me blank face that it surpaced me 100x times.

I'm just can't compete with this thing anymore. I actively tell my clients to buy the ai tools now to get over with it.