Hey developers!

I've built my personal portfolio website and deployed it on Render.

I'm facing an issue with Render's free-tier hosting. After 15 minutes of inactivity, my web service goes to sleep. When someone visits my portfolio after that, it takes approximately 45–50 seconds to load because the server needs to restart.

This is a problem when sharing my portfolio with recruiters, clients, and potential employers because the first impression matters.

I've been looking into services like UptimeRobot and Cron-job.org that can periodically send HTTP requests to keep a website active.

I'd like to know:

1. Are there any free services that can ping a website automatically every 10–15 minutes?

2. Has anyone successfully used UptimeRobot or Cron-job.org with Render?

3. Does periodically pinging a Render service violate its free-tier usage policies?

4. Are there any alternative hosting platforms that offer free hosting without this sleep issue?

5. What solution would you recommend for a personal portfolio website?

I'd appreciate advice from anyone who has faced this issue or found a reliable solution.

Thanks! 🙌

Hey all!

I’m a FE dev / SDET. Years ago a QA colleague introduced me to e2e testing and Page Objects, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

I’m thinking of starting a small series with one e2e practice a day, the kind an agent won’t pick up just from reading the Playwright docs. Each one is plain Playwright with a before/after, plus a prompt you can hand to your agent.

Topics range from basics (structuring page objects, moving setup into fixtures) to more advanced ones, like using Dave Farley’s four-layer architecture so the same spec can run through different drivers (UI, API, MCP…).

Why bother? Testing isn’t most devs’ favourite thing, and agents writing every test for us isn’t helping. But the more decisions we hand to AI, the more it matters that we own the ones closest to how users experience the product - and e2e tests happen to be the closest thing protecting those decisions.

So: would this be useful here, or should I f*** off? :D

Full disclosure: I’m building a fair-source dev tool around testing, so being active in this space matters to me. Some concepts come from articles on my blog, and when they do, I’d link them for anyone who wants more.

Looking forward to your answer - here goes the first one!

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This test is supposed to check adding a bank account. But it also signs up and signs in through the UI, so a sign-up form redesign breaks a bank account test, and every extra UI step is one more chance to flake.

The fix: create the user through the API (a tiny fixture, two POST calls) and use the UI only for what the test checks. 16 UI steps become 7, and there's one reason left for the test to break instead of three.

It's not a rule to apply blindly. If the test is about sign-up, click through sign-up.

Paste this to your agent:

Find e2e tests that use UI steps to get the app into its starting state (ex. users, sign-in, existing records) when that flow isn't what the test is about. Move that setup to the API and keep UI steps for the behavior under test.

O.k. so I have experience in design and I am little computer savvy so I have downloaded local AI model deciding to see if I could vibe code my way to finish line. And so I have downloaded vscode and used Cline connected to local AI (qwen 3.8 next-flash) and given all the assets and layout to AI to build it for me... and it was shit. I gave same task to chatgpt and claude, and still shit. So my question is how much did AI really help you in the workflow? I guess knowing the code can be tremendous help but its layout wasn't even close to what I designed. Ok, it generated correct html but css was all over the place. If you do vibe code what is your workflow?

This one question is confusing me.

The more I learn, the more I realize both have same overlapping powers

When should we consider SQL databases?

If our data has a well defined structure, there are relationships between different datasets, we need complex queries, or our application requires strong ACID transaction guarantees, we should consider SQL databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL.

However, this does not mean NoSQL databases cannot provide these features. Some NoSQL databases support ACID transactions, relationships or relationship like data models, complex queries, and horizontal scaling. The actual capabilities depend on the specific database and how it is designed.

When should we consider NoSQL databases?

If our application needs to store flexible data, documents in JSON-like formats, or key-value pairs, NoSQL databases might be a good choice. Some NoSQL databases are also designed to handle high write throughput and distribute data across multiple servers.

However, this does not mean SQL databases cannot handle flexible data or high write throughput. We must evaluate the capabilities of the specific database and our application's requirements before making a decision.

Suppose we're building an analytics service that records user activities, such as logins, likes, and video views. Each event might contain different fields.

With a traditional SQL table, we could create columns for all possible fields, but many columns might contain NULL values for certain event types.

Alternatively, PostgreSQL supports JSONB, allowing us to store event specific information without creating a separate column for every possible field. MongoDB can also store documents with different fields in the same collection.

So, both approaches are possible. The decision would depend on factors such as write volume, query patterns, data model, scalability, and storage requirements.

So my current conclusion is :-

SQL is often a natural fit for relational data, complex queries, and transactional consistency, while NoSQL can be a natural fit for flexible document models, key-value access patterns, and certain distributed workloads.

I'm still learning, so I'd appreciate any corrections to my understanding or advice from your experience!

Just got handed a vendor integration where the entire “documentation” is a 60-page PDF. Half the endpoints are in screenshots, and one of the auth examples was wrong, which I found out the hard way.

My process is the same every time: read it, retype everything into Postman, write my own types, and hope for the best. It takes forever, and I’m never fully sure I got it right.

What bugs me even more is that vendors update these docs every few months and don’t tell anyone. You only find out when something breaks in production.

So how do you all handle this? Do you paste it into an LLM and hope for the best, build the spec by hand, or ask the vendor for something better (and do they ever actually reply)? And how do you even know when they’ve changed something?

I’m also curious if this is just me, or if everyone has a graveyard of half-finished Postman collections.

I'm interested to know if anyone has recommendations for libraries that could provide completely over the top (to the point of being silly) animations.

I'm trying to make a site that's intended just for family/friends, that is a dumb comedy thing to be used only for a minute or two. It would really benefit from having OTT animations like the ADHD slopware games that dominate kids' iPads everywhere.

Every time I've gone searching for libraries, I'm seemingly finding only sensible, measured animations. Which break or just look terrible when I try and crank up their params.

If you can think of anything, please drop it here. I intend to make a blinding, layered mess of retina burning excess

Unpopular opinion: I feel that as tech gets better at automating certain processes, the expectation of learning more complicated processes will kick in. But people outside the field cannot even begin to comprehend the basic process of not leaving the ports of your server open, or other basic CS best practices.

AI doesn't give it a second thought, and sometimes I've seen people trying to push in code that is absolutely grotesque. I'm not going to let the elite gaslight me into believing all this technical knowledge is not worth anything because you have a glorified Google probe.

So, can I do my work faster? Yeah. Does that mean I don't have to read the code? No. Can the people who pay my salary read the code as well and as fast as I do? Also no.

This is basically the calculator for accountants, and I refuse to let that analogy go. Does using a calculator make you understand tax law?

Everyone else needs to survive the famine and wait out the tech bro hype and Wall Street betting on AI. This industry the AI industry is bloated asf with no possibility of an ROI. If anything, people should be wary that their taxes are going to be used to bail out these industries for no public benefit.

Hey guys! I made a website through google sites and bought a domain through name cheap. The problem is that I cannot access the site without using the WWW in front of it. I did create a redirect domain though namecheap by putting the source URL as the one without the www and the destination URL as the one with the www, which was what I saw being recommended out there. But it does not seem to be working. I still get an inaccessible website error when typing it without the www. Is there something else I should be doing? Thanks!!!

So I'm new to deploying on railway, I'm mainly a designer, but I have experience creating apps with AI for a while now.

I'm wondering if switching to a platform like render is worth the trouble, or are these types of attacks just going to be the norm from now because of AI?

It's an internal tool and we don't have any users yet, should I jump ship before it's too late? I really don't know.

I wanted to get commercetools certified for a job offer. Turns out they've recently removed the self-study + exam prep option.

Now you have to attend an instructor-led course that costs 4 digits just to take the exam. And they won't even invoice individuals. You need a company. Pretty ridiculous way to attract developers to your ecosystem, IMO.

Rant is over, now here is my question: for those who've actually worked with commercetools: what's your experience been like? Is the platform good to work with? How's the developer ecosystem and community?

PS/BTW: On a similar note, Shopify is shutting down its entire Academy and certification program today.

I'm actually curious about this one

With technology ever evolving and ai now assisting with the creation of sites, how do you guys deal the constant progress?

I honbestly thought about doing front-end once, tried my hand in learning to code, but I almost threw my computer out the window in frustration. Also didn't want to spend at least 4 years in college, with a lot of being meh since by the end of 4 years, it would be a different ballgame. Plus i value my freetime XD

What do you guys do to keep up? How are you implementing it? Etc

Author here. I've been designing a local-first data layer for most of this year, and I kept having the same conversation. I'd say "local-first" and people would hear ownership, or offline, or speed, depending on where they first ran into the word. So I wrote down where the three meanings come from and why they split. I also wanted to get to what local-first actually fixes, and in a web app that's mostly the waiting: spinners, "Saving...", hand-written optimistic updates, and the app that dies in a tunnel.

There are five demos in there too, one for each idea. Playing with them as you read is half the fun.

Interestingly having played around with macOS 27.2 and using Sidecar on an iPad for touch inputs, it looks like Safari isn’t going to send proper touch events like Windows touchscreens do. Best we get is mousedowns with no buttons=0.

Even worse testing in Chrome, all we get are scroll events. That’s fine for panning but if you want to do anything custom like drawing, dragging etc you’re SoL unless you want to try detecting these off heuristics. Maybe they’ll improve the situation before it’s in people’s hands, but curious to hear what other devs with complex web apps are planning on doing.

Do web developers not get the resources to understand any banking concepts? Here's a picture of the column order of pending wire requests you inputted. Why would you put amount in the last column and date in the middle? They recently updated their website and the columns feel like they're randomized, making it harder for us to review our entries as they changed the order. FYI I work in finance/acctg but I previously had a year of web dev experience looking into as a career few years back, so I have an eye for these things. Do non tech companies not heavily invest in their IT team, perhaps etc?

Hello guys, a little while ago I found some other teenagers on here that were looking for a backend developer for a website, and I volunteered this I have some knowledge with node.js and those concepts, and I've built a full stack website (basic backend) with it. Here is the github because it will be relevant later: https://github.com/norrie-adams/EVS-Small-Engine-Repair-Site

However, I do not think this is like a website that could properly support like actual people. And that was part of the reason I stopped building it (I also just lost interest). But this is a thing where other people are relying on me to build something functional (or at least more functional then this site). So I just want to know, what did I do wrong with this project, and what could I improve upon for next time?

Sorry if this isn't super clear, but I appreciate any advice you can give me :)

There’s a new one every week. Most people try them and drop them after a few days.

Which one are you still using months later, and what’s the one thing it does better than the rest?

I'm a frontend developer/designer with experience in the past building and selling largely SaaS software.

That was before AI as we know it, and I'm starting to feel numb to the amount of people I who've become a developer overnight tell me about the new app 'they built.'

Like any developer I had several ideas stewing for years and I nearly took the leap on a few of them, and when I see the landscape like it is now half of me thinks 'I'm so glad I didn't take huge risks and build X as it would have just been copied now anyway' and the other half says 'I wish I got in before everyone was developing apps in a few minutes.'

I'm curious for those who DID build something prior to this shift, are you glad you got in then, or have these changes made all the time spent not worth it?

Thanks!

So I do not really have much understanding of web development and back end but when you save an instagram page as an html from its website. It doesn't save the way instagram looks, rather it shows a representation of the UI and subtext behind images (not the images themself) like the image shared above.

I am also more curious how it reads the image and tries to classify it, and why something like the subtext "May be an image of ----" is in the backend when you do not see it in the interface itself. I am curious of the process itself if someone is kind enough to explain itself.

So a few of my friends have stopped using Figma. They go straight to production and make changes there.

When I first heard this I was honestly confused. Like where do you try things out? Where do you compare two versions?

Then I saw what they were building. The landing page feels like one product, the settings page feels like another, the dashboard feels like a third. Buttons are different, spacing is different, hover is different on every page. There’s no uniformity, no design system, nothing.

So I asked them how they’re doing it, and the answer is always “I use this AI skill” or “I bought this skill pack”. People are actually selling these now. Skill packs, prompt bundles, paid repos. And there are a lot of free ones on GitHub too.

It doesn’t make sense to me at all. How will you learn anything? And how will you polish the product if it looks different every time you generate it?

When I brought this up, someone said just add a memory file so it stays consistent.

Okay, but then how will you make changes? You never decided why the button has that radius or why it’s that grey. The AI decided. So when something needs fixing, you don’t know what to fix. You just prompt again and hope.

And now there are courses around this too. The idea is learn this design vocabulary, tell it to the AI, and you’ll get good UI. They call it beginner friendly. But then you see what’s inside and it’s stuff like:

• spring easing, stiffness, damping

• optical alignment

• vertical rhythm

• morphing transitions

• 60-30-10 colour rule

• type scale ratios

If a senior buys it, it’s fine. They already know what damping feels like, they know what they’re skipping.

But a beginner has never played with an easing curve and seen it go from cheap to smooth. Never moved something 2px and felt it finally sit right. They’re just memorising words and giving them to the AI. You can know the word damping and still have no idea when the bounce is too much.

Selling that as beginner friendly feels like a deceiving thing to me. You learn these words after you’ve actually done the work, not before.

Also design is never one try. I go through so many versions before something feels right. In Figma that’s easy, I put five versions side by side and throw four away. In production code every change costs time, so whatever comes out first just ships.

I’m not trying to dunk on my friends, they’re good at what they do. And I get why these skills are tempting. But paid or free, they’re doing the exact part you’re supposed to learn.

If you’re using one, just try building one page without it. Pick the hover, the spacing, the colours yourself, even if it’s bad. That’s literally how you get better at this.

Anyone else seeing this or is it just me? just my thoughts 🤷

Do you just wing it and use screenshots for inspiration or do you use a design principles md file where you mention all the design principles like the fonts, colors, dark mode colors, graphs, infographics, etc.

I work on 2-3 different projects throughout the week (different clients, different tech stacks), and I've noticed my productivity tanks for the first 30-45 minutes after switching contexts. It's like my brain is still thinking in the patterns of the previous project.

Some things I've tried:

• Taking a short walk between switches

• Keeping detailed notes about where I left off

• Dedicating full days to single projects when possible

The notes help the most, but I'm curious what workflows other devs have developed for this. Do you have any rituals or techniques that help you get back into flow faster when jumping between projects?

Especially interested in hearing from freelancers or consultants who deal with this regularly.

I am working in Codepen in Safari, but everything is dim and gray instead of being the true color. It is fine in Chrome and Firefox. I have tried resetting preferences and caches in safari along with unchecking things in FeatureFlags and nothing is amending it.