Practical guides on JSON, JWT, Base64, regex, hashing, and more. Written for developers who want answers, not blog spam.
A curated list of 15 free, instant-load developer tools that solve everyday tasks: JSON, regex, JWT, base64, hash, UUID, diff, and more.
How modern diff algorithms work — Myers, patience, histogram, and the new Heckel-style approaches used by VS Code and Cursor in 2026.
Seconds vs milliseconds, timezones, ISO 8601, leap seconds, and the Y2038 problem. Everything you need to know about Unix timestamps in 2026.
Why URL encoding bugs persist in 2026, the difference between encodeURI and encodeURIComponent, and how to handle Unicode and special characters correctly.
Practical guide to cryptographic hash functions: when MD5 is fine, why SHA-1 is broken, and what SHA-256 / BLAKE3 should be used for in 2026.
YAML and JSON both work for config files, but each has hidden costs. The Norway problem, type ambiguity, comments, and which to use when.
Fifty production-grade regex patterns: email, URLs, IP, phone, credit card, ISBN, date, password validation. With explanations and gotchas.
UUIDv7 added time-ordering to UUIDs in 2024. Here is when to use v4, when to use v7, and the database performance implications of each.
Five practical ways to convert JSON to CSV: jq, Python, Node, browser tools, and online converters. Edge cases for nested objects and arrays.
How Base64 encoding works, when to use it (and when not), and the surprising performance and size implications of using it for binary data over JSON.
JSON Web Tokens vs traditional session cookies — the security tradeoffs, scaling implications, and real code examples for each approach in 2026.
Everything you should know about formatting JSON for production APIs: indentation, key ordering, large numbers, dates, and the spec edge cases.