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Why Most Interior Designer Websites Don't Generate Leads (And How to Fix It)

A beautiful website isn't enough. If it isn't generating enquiries, it's just an online portfolio.When I audit websites for architects and interior designers, I notice the same pattern.The websites look stunning.Beautiful animations.High-quality project photography.Minimalist design.But...They're invisible on Google and rarely generate qualified leads.The problem isn't the aesthetics—it's that the website was designed for awards instead of business growth.Let's break down the five biggest mistak

How I Built a Self-Employment Tax Calculator with Zero Dependencies

When you get a W-2, the government takes its cut before you ever see the money. Social Security, Medicare, all of it, handled by payroll software. When you're self-employed, you get to do that math yourself, and the "15.3% self-employment tax" everyone quotes is quietly wrong in three ways. It's 15.3% of 92.35% of your income, the Social Security half stops at a wage cap, and if you earn enough, a 0.9% surtax kicks in on top.I built a calculator that gets all three right in a single HTML file. N

.env vs .env.example: What's the Difference and Why You Need Both

If you've cloned an open-source project from GitHub, you've probably seen these two files:.env.env.exampleAt first glance, they look similar, but they serve completely different purposes.Let's understand the difference. What is a .env file?A .env file contains the actual environment variables that your application uses while running.Example:DATABASE_URL=postgres://user:password@localhost:5432/mydbJWT_SECRET=mySuperSecretKeyAPI_KEY=abc123xyzPORT=3000These values are real secrets.Your applica

React 19's useOptimistic Fixed My Instant UI. Then Combining It With useActionState Broke My Reset Button

Part 1 was about waiting well. This one is about not waiting at all, and about a couple of mistakes I made along the way that are worth walking through in the open.If you read Part 1 on useActionState, you already know the shape of the problem it solves: three hand-rolled state variables, a try/catch/finally, and a pending flag you're hoping stays in sync with reality. useActionState fixes that for the "wait for the server, then show the result" case, and I closed that piece by saying useOptimis

The IBAN mod-97 checksum, explained (and how to validate one in one line)

Ever wondered how your bank instantly knows you fat-fingered an IBAN before it even checks if the account exists? It's a checksum: ISO 13616's mod-97 algorithm.Here's the short version: move the first four characters to the end, convert letters to numbers (A=10, B=11...), then check if the resulting number mod 97 equals 1. That's it — no database lookup needed to catch most typos.// simplified version of the checkfunction ibanChecksumValid(iban) { const rearranged = iban.slice(4) + iban.slice(0

Creating a Simple Authentication System Using BCryptJS, JWT, and Express-Validator

IntroductionMany modern websites require users to create an account in order to take full advantage of their services. While this can be convenient depending on the platform, it also leaves users vulnerable to one of the ever-enduring problems of the Internet — cyberattacks. Fortunately, there are many methods available to protect user data from theft. BCryptJS and JSONWebToken are two of the most commonly used libraries for this purpose. BCrypt, to put it simply, is a function that obscur

Json and API fetch in js

JSON:JSON means JavaScript Object Notation.JSON is a Text Format for storing and exchanging data.JSON is a array of object.JSON StructureJSON data is composed of objects and arrays:Objects: Enclosed in curly braces {}, containing name/value pairs. Each name (key) must be a string in double quotes, followed by a colon and a value.Example:{ "firstName": "John", "lastName": "Doe", "age": 30}Arrays:Enclosed in square brackets [], containing a list of values, which can be objects, strings, numbers

Twelve retro photo effects in one WebGL fragment shader (and why the photo never leaves the browser)

Every "make my photo look like film" tool I looked at wanted me to upload the photo first. That is a server bill, a privacy promise I would have to keep, and a round trip before the user sees anything.None of it is necessary. Grain, bloom, chromatic aberration, color grading: these are per-pixel math. The GPU in the phone that took the photo can do all of it, in real time, while the file stays in memory.Here is how the shader is built, including several things I got wrong and had to correct.

Regex Tester Guide: Master Regular Expressions

Regex Tester Guide: Master Regular Expressions What Are Regular Expressions?Regular expressions (regex) are patterns used to match, search, and manipulate text. They are supported in virtually every programming language and are essential for tasks like input validation, data extraction, and text processing. A regex like ^\d{3}-\d{2}-\d{4}$ matches a US Social Security Number format. Essential Regex Syntax. — matches any character except newline***** — zero or more of the precedin

Diff Checker Guide: Compare Text Like a Pro

Diff Checker Guide: Compare Text Like a Pro What Is a Diff Checker?A diff checker compares two pieces of text and highlights the differences between them. It is the visual equivalent of the Unix diff command, showing you exactly what was added, removed, or changed — line by line and character by character. How Diff Algorithms WorkDiff algorithms find the longest common subsequence (LCS) between two texts. The classic Myers diff algorithm runs in O(ND) time where N is the total le

Experts Agree: Software Engineering AI Completion Is Broken

New React developers waste hours on syntax, yet AI plugins promise a 70% cut. Discover why the tools are falling short and what experts recommend.<a href="https://techcraft.live/experts-agree-software-engineering-ai-completion-b/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=social" rel="noopener noreferrer">Read the full article on our blog</a>

Agent skills that bring team coding standards to Claude Code and Codex

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react-candlesticks: Composable Candlestick Charts for React, Rendered on Canvas

react-candlesticks is an open-source React/TypeScript library for financial charts: candlesticks, volume, technical indicators, theming, and (still early) support for custom layers and drawings. Panels and layers are separate components you assemble in JSX, and Canvas is used to handle the rendering underneath.A `react-candlesticks` chart with candlesticks, indicator overlays and volume.I developed it because I needed candlestick charts for a trading app I was building. I began a couple of years

React Is Not Dying, but Frontend Development Is Changing Fast

React Is Not Dying, but Frontend Development Is Changing FastA few years ago, starting a React project felt almost effortless.You opened a terminal, ran one command, waited for the installation to finish, and started building components.npx create-react-app my-appThere was a clear mental model:React handled the interfaceJavaScript handled the logicCSS handled the stylingan API handled the dataThat simplicity helped React become the default choice for modern frontend development.Today, the

🚀 Next.js 16.3 Has a New useOffline Hook

Meet useOffline 👇It lets you know when the user loses their internet connection.const isOffline = useOffline()return isOffline ? You’re offline : <App />So instead of your app silently breaking when the connection drops, you can show a proper offline state.For example:📡 Online→ Show the app📴 Offline→ Show an offline message or disable actions that need the networkOne important thing:useOffline does not make your app offline-first.You still need things like caching, Ind

Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

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Buckminster Fuller: everything I know

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Show HN: Fine-tune an 8B model on a 4 GB laptop GPU

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Keyv and friends compromised in active Shai-Hulud supply chain attack

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Three times this week a tool said it worked, and it had not

Three times this week a tool told me it had done something, and it had not. Not one of them threw an error. Each looked exactly like success, and each was caught only because I went and checked the actual artefact afterwards.I maintain a set of calculators and a small formula library, so most of my week is arithmetic and DOM. None of these bugs were exotic. That is the point — they are the ordinary kind, the kind that ships. 1. Grepping HTML for a word is not reading a pageI needed to know