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How I Built PATH SSC — A Government Exam Companion (Honest Build Journal)

How I Built PATH SSC — A Government Exam Companion (Honest Build Journal)Every day, lakhs of students in India prepare for government exams — SSC GD, CHSL, CGL, MTS, and Railway NTPC / Group D. They search for syllabus, practice questions, mock tests, and notes. I wanted to build something genuinely useful for them. Not another flashy app with fake reviews, but a clean, honest study companion.This is the build journal of PATH SSC — what it is, what is real today, what is not, and the hones

🚀 New React Challenge: Collaborative Editor

Most editors keep the truth in local state and hope that the save, a second tab, and a remote collaborator all agree. This challenge inverts that: every change is an immutable event appended to a log, and the document you see is just a projection of it. 🧩 OverviewBuild a collaborative notes editor as a tiny event-sourced + CQRS system. Edits are optimistic, the document is rebuilt from the event log, autosave debounces into a single request, and a simulated peer merges its events through th

GraphQL @defer: Stop Letting Your Slowest Field Set Your Load Time

The pitch for GraphQL is that a page asks for everything it needs in one request. The catch nobody puts on the slide: that one request is only as fast as its slowest field. Your product page has name, price, and image ready in 20ms, but reviews calls a service that takes 900ms, so the whole response waits 900ms. The user stares at a spinner for data you already had.The usual workaround is to split the query in two and fire the slow one separately. That works, but it throws away the thing you lik

If React Is So Popular, Why Do We Need Next.js?

Hey fellow developers! I am back after a decade ig😂Have you ever thought that: "If React is so popular and powerful, why was Next.js even created?"This is a question many of us ask when we first start learning modern frontend development. React already lets us build beautiful, interactive user interfaces. So why did the community feel the need for something called Next.js? And why do so many companies now prefer Next.js over plain React?This is Part 1 of my Next.js learning series. I’ve only cov

How I Built PATH SSC — A Government Exam Companion (Frontend Prototype, Verified Features Only)

PATH SSC is a government exam preparation companion I built for Indian aspirants — SSC GD, CHSL, CGL, MTS and Railway NTPC / Group D students. It runs as a React 18 + Vite 5 frontend with 22 screens, a verified design system (teal #218DAE, cyan #2BBBD7, yellow #FFD758) and a PWA manifest.This article is honest: the app is a frontend-only prototype (ARCHITECTURE_AUDIT.md verified 2026-11-03). No backend exists yet. No real notifications. Job data is hardcoded samples with invented vacancy numbers

After 5 years, Wasp 1.0 is coming: a 6-month plan for our full-stack JS framework

The time has come: Wasp 1.0 is now officially in the works! ETA: ~6 months.Even though still young in framework-years, Wasp has been around for some time now (>5y), with over 100 releases, user stories ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, $5M raised in funding so far, and a team of currently 8 people and growing behind it plus all the awesome people from our community (waspeteers).And yet, for years now, we kept Wasp in Beta. Read on to learn why, what changed, and what you can exp

React Mastery Series — Part 11: State Management in React — Context API, Redux Toolkit & Zustand

Welcome to Part 11 and the final article of the React Mastery Series!As React applications grow, managing state becomes one of the most important challenges developers face.At first, useState is usually enough. But what happens when multiple components need access to the same data? What if you have authentication, shopping carts, themes, notifications, filters, or complex application workflows?That's where state management comes in.In this article, we'll explore the most important state manageme

Thirteen of the sixteen types in our Electron UI are second copies, and one field in them exists nowhere else

Notifio is a desktop app that watches rental search pages and emails you when a new listing appears. Its window is a React app, and it does not reach the main process through IPC or a preload bridge. It makes HTTP requests to an Express server running inside the same Electron process, which I have written about before and still think is the right call for this app.It does have one consequence nobody mentions when they recommend it. The boundary is JSON over a socket, so TypeScript cannot cross i

React Mastery Series — Part 10: React Router — Routing, Nested Routes & Navigation

So far, we've built React applications using components, props, state, Hooks, and TypeScript.But most real-world applications have more than one page.Think about an e-commerce application:/ — Home page/products — Product listing/products/42 — Product details/cart — Shopping cart/login — Login page/dashboard — User dashboardHow can we navigate between these pages without reloading the entire application?The answer is React Router.React Router is a routing library that allows React applications to

Building PROFIT: A Cloud Gym Management SaaS with Biometric QR Turnstiles & WhatsApp Automation

Over the past few months, I set out to solve a massive operational headache plaguing modern fitness centers: manual attendance registers, revenue leakage, and disconnected member tracking.Most traditional gyms still rely on paper logs or clunky desktop software. When memberships expire, 15% to 25% of members continue working out undetected, front desks struggle with payment follow-ups, and athletes have no unified way to track progressive overload.To solve this, I designed and built PROFIT Train

Offline by Design: Why the OnePassApps Studios Still Work With the Network Cut

I work on OnePassApps, so this is our own product and everything below is a measurement of our own build, taken in the live tab on 4 November 2026.There is a claim that runs through all seven of our browser studios: the file never leaves the tab. That claim is easy to make and easy to fake. The stronger question is what happens when the network is gone entirely. If the tool only works because a server is answering, then the file stays local but the tool is not really local.So I cut the network a

100,000 Rows. 200 Columns. Can Your JavaScript Data Grid Handle It?

Why real-world data grid performance depends on more than dataset size — and what developers should test before choosing a component.A JavaScript data grid can look impressive in a demo. Scrolling is smooth, sorting is instant, and thousands of rows appear without hesitation.But what happens when that same grid becomes part of a production application?Imagine an enterprise reporting interface with 100,000 records and 200 columns. Users need to navigate large datasets, resize and reorder columns,

A Jeeves for Every Coding Agent, a Pit Crew for Your Mac, and Simulators That Outlive Their App

You’re reading The React Native Rewind #64. Right Ho, AgentBertie Wooster never once worked out what to do next, which was fine, because Jeeves always had.Coding agents poking at Expo apps have been Bertie for a while: booting the wrong simulator, rebuilding when a reload would do, then asking us what went wrong.Kudo Chien (@kudochien) and Vojtech Novak (@vonovak) just introduced @expo/agent-cli, an experimental CLI "built by agents and designed for agents".What does it do that npx expo doe

How I made crypto payments work with a username instead of a 42-character address

I'm a solo developer from Tajikistan. Every time I watched someone send USDT, the ritual was the same: copy a 42-character address, paste it, compare the first four and last four characters, hesitate, compare again. One wrong character and the money is gone.So I built NoN Wallet, a self-custody wallet where you send money to a name. Here's how it works under the hood, and what I learned building it. 1. Creating a wallet: a name and a passwordMost wallets open with "write down these 12 words

Why Your Image Previews Should Never Inherit the Original File's Metadata

Why Your Image Previews Should Never Inherit the Original File's MetadataA user uploads a photograph, your application generates a smaller preview, and everything appears to work perfectly.The image loads quickly. The dimensions are correct. The thumbnail looks sharp.But there's a problem: the preview may still contain metadata from the original photograph, including GPS coordinates, camera details, timestamps, and information about the software used to edit it.For applications that handle

The water remembers your finger: a heightfield, a current field, and fish that acclimate

AQUIFER is a single-file underwater toy. No start screen, no instructions. You touch the water, and the water is the controller.Three systems do almost all of the work:1. A heightfield for the surface disturbance. A stroke adds energy to a grid; the grid relaxes and propagates. Fish and light read the same field, so a hard swipe and a slow drag genuinely feel different downstream, not just visually.2. A direction-aware current field. Strokes write vectors, not just bumps. Drag is anisotropic: a

The aria-live Message That Didn't Announce Itself

This is the contact form on my own portfolio site, the first project where I used JavaScript. I built it with an AI design partner, which reviewed my code, explained concepts, and helped me debug. The code is in the repo and the site is live. This post is about one part of the form: the message that appears after you press "Send message", and why it took two attempts to get a screen reader to announce it.The form validates in JavaScript, then sends the data to Formspree with fetch(). After that,

Compositing gave me a ground-truth alpha, but the truth came from a model

For a course project I wanted numbers for video background removal, not just squinting at frames. SAD, MSE and the rest all need a ground-truth alpha for every frame, and nobody hand-paints that for real footage. The usual trick is to build the clip backwards: take a foreground whose alpha you already know and composite it onto a background yourself. It worked, with one catch in what that "truth" actually is. Everything below comes from one synthetic clip, 90 frames at 540×960, one machine, one

My matting pick won all 90 frames and still flickered more in 89 of 89

If a small client job asks for talking-head clips with the background cut out, I'd want to know before quoting whether a free FFmpeg chroma key is enough or whether I need an AI matting model. So on 2026-11-03 I built a small test, scored both, and got a result that changed how I read my own numbers: the AI matte had a lower error than the chroma key on every one of 90 frames, and it also flickered more on 89 of the 89 frame-to-frame steps. The test I could affordI don't have hand-pulled gr

Zero-Upload Image Processing: Compressing, Cropping, and Removing Backgrounds in Browser RAM (Architecture Deep Dive 2026)

Why are we sending confidential family photos, passport scans, and client assets across oceans just to delete white pixels?Most "online image converters" are subscription traps:"Upload your image to our AI engine..."You wait 30 seconds for a fake loading bar."You have used 1 of 1 free monthly credits! Upgrade to Pro for $19.99/mo to download high-res."Basic image manipulation—segmentation, canvas cropping, compression, and WebP encoding—can execute in sandboxed browser memory at 60 frames per se