software-engineering

Building Flutter Ads: A Cross-Platform Ad SDK for Flutter Over the years I've built multiple Flutter applications and repeatedly faced the same challenge: monetization. Most advertising solutions focus primarily on Android and iOS, while support for Flutter Web and desktop platforms is often limited or requires platform-specific workarounds. I wanted a simpler approach. That's why I built Flutter…

Introducing SignalOps API Developer APIs for moderation, email, verification, and IP intelligence. https://signalopsapi.com SignalOps API and other developer infrastructure products. https://voyantnetworks.com Over the last few years I've worked on products that needed moderation, abuse prevention, fraud detection, email infrastructure, and traffic intelligence. One problem kept appearing repeate…

As developers, we compare files constantly — reviewing pull requests, checking config changes, spotting bugs between versions. But not all diff tools are created equal. Some require installation, some upload your files to remote servers, and some just don't support the formats you need. Here's a rundown of the best free file diff tools available in 2026, so you can pick the right one for your wor…

If you sell a desktop app on Gumroad, it hands every buyer a license key. But Gumroad stops there — checking that key inside your app is entirely up to you. Here's how to do it properly in Node/Electron, plus the three traps that catch almost everyone. We'll use gumroad-license-lite, a tiny, zero-dependency, MIT-licensed helper (you can npm install it or just copy its ~120 lines). Turn on license…

The thesis Quorum is built on is uncomfortable and true: the tools a team uses to coordinate an incident often live in the same region as the thing that is failing. When the region goes, the incident response goes with it. You are now coordinating a region outage over a status page that the region outage took down. Quorum is an incident command plane designed to survive a region loss. This post i…

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Quorum is an incident command plane built on Amazon Aurora DSQL. The failover story lives in another post. This one is about a narrower question that turned out to be the foundation: when several responders write to the same incident at the same moment, across regions, during the worst minutes of an outage, how do you guarantee the record never forks into two conflicting truths. The answer is two…

My day job is at a large tech company. Hundreds of engineering teams, and every one of them is somewhere different on AI adoption. Some are still treating coding agents as a curiosity. Some have quietly rebuilt their whole workflow around them. Most are in the messy middle, and watching that middle is where the idea for Penling came from. Spec-driven development has arrived, and I think it's the …

Incident response automation is a trap. Some things should be automated. Some things absolutely should not be. Getting the line wrong is worse than automating nothing. What to automate 1. Alert enrichment. Before a human sees an alert, automate pulling in related data: recent deploys, dependent service health, historical correlation. Save the human 10 minutes of context-gathering. 2. Known-good r…

I was working on a project a while back where the users had to use the app in three different places. They needed to use it on desktop computers at the office on Android tablets when they were out in the field and on iPhones when they were moving around. This was a problem because we had one team and we did not want to deal with three sets of code. This project made me think about how to make the…

If you've spent time on software engineering teams, you know pull request reviews are the ultimate bottleneck. They're slow, inconsistent, and often skipped entirely under deadline pressure. Reviewers get fatigued, rubber-stamp approvals become the norm, and suddenly, subtle bugs creep into the codebase. Human review is essential for architectural alignment, but for catching obvious code smells o…

There is common point of confusion. what's the different between REST API vs. HTTP API in AWS and what's the different between them and a traditional Rest API you write with e.g express in node in the broader software world, a "REST API" is just an architectural pattern built on top of HTTP requests. The confusion comes entirely from AWS-specific marketing terminology . When you are inside the AW…

I already let my AI agent read and repair my self-hosted n8n workflows. So when a client's Make.com scenario started misfiring — duplicate WhatsApp order notifications, fired in bursts — my first instinct wasn't to log into the web UI. It was: can I give the agent the same remote access to Make that it has to n8n? Make.com shipped both a REST API and an MCP endpoint. So yes. But getting from "the…

The README lies. Not on purpose. It was true the day someone wrote it. Then the function got renamed, the flag got removed, the env var changed, the endpoint moved — and nobody touched the docs, because nobody's job is the docs. So the README quietly drifts away from the code, and the first person to find out is whoever copy-pastes the snippet that no longer works. If you've ever opened a doc pag…

My journey as a Frontend & Full Stack Developer building modern web applications. As a developer, I've spent a lot of time building applications using React.js. React is an amazing library, but as projects grew larger, I started facing challenges related to SEO, performance, routing, and backend integration. That's when I started exploring Next.js seriously. After building multiple projects with …

How WSO2 API Manager Transforms API Analytics & Monitoring Published on Dev.to — by Chamath H. Gunawardhana The Problem with Flying Blind Imagine you've built and deployed a set of APIs powering your mobile app, your partner integrations, and your internal services. Traffic is flowing — but do you know which APIs are being called the most? Which ones are failing? Who is consuming the most bandwid…

If you've ever used Django, you know the feeling: one command, and you have an admin panel, an ORM, form validation, middleware, session handling — everything just works. Then you try Rust web development, and you're back to assembling pieces yourself. That's why I built Runique : a batteries-included web framework for Rust, inspired by Django's philosophy, built on top of Axum and Tokio. Why "Dj…

If you're a developer who hasn't tried Claude Code yet, you may have missed one of the biggest shifts in software development. Until recently, AI coding tools meant smart autocomplete. You started a line, the tool suggested the rest. Helpful — but you were still the driver, and AI was the passenger. Claude Code inverts that. You say "find and fix this bug" or "build this API endpoint with tests,"…

I told myself it would be fine. I had been using AI coding assistants for suggestions and autocomplete for months — and it worked great. So when a new project came up with a tight deadline, I thought: why not let AI handle the whole backend? I set up a Cursor workspace, wrote a detailed spec, and hit generate. What followed was 5 days of "it compiles, but..." debugging that taught me more about s…

Groundbreaker Talents has officially opened applications for its Cohort 7 Software & AI Engineering Scholarship Program 2026, a fully funded residential opportunity designed to empower young African women with industry-ready technology skills. The scholarship is specifically created for ambitious women from financially constrained backgrounds who want to build careers in Software Development and …