So… last time I was on here I said something about giving the blog another go.
That went great obviously.
That was nearly nine years ago now apparently. My third child is at school. I think that says everything you need to know about my commitment to regular blogging.
Anyway. I keep telling myself this blog is mostly for me anyway. A brain dump. And right now my brain is full again.
So what have I actually been up to all this time?
The usual stuff.
- still doing the atebyteapps thing
- more insurance domain work.
- watched the kids get big. Weird thing to observe happening in real time.
- renovated things. Paid for things. Watched tradies. Standard.
- still playing amateur football. Still not particularly good at it.
And somewhere in all of that I ended up building a whole pile of developer tools.
The back story is pretty boring and I’m sure you can relate. I kept needing to do the same stupid little things over and over. Decode a JWT. Make a wall of JSON actually readable. Generate a UUID. Convert a timestamp because some API refuses to give me anything but epoch time.
Every time I’d go looking for a tool to do it I’d land on some site with more popups than functionality. Or it wanted me to create an account before I could paste in a single string.
Drives me nuts.
So I made my own.
ateByteApps DevTools - a pile of free online developer tools that do the job and get out of the way.
Everything runs in your browser. No accounts, minimal ads (gotta pay for school fees), nothing gets sent off to some server somewhere. Which is handy when the thing you’re pasting in is a JWT or a bit of production config you probably shouldn’t have copied anyway.
A few of my favourites:
- JSON Formatter - pretty printing a wall of JSON should not be a premium feature
- JWT Reader - I lose too many hours of my life to these things
- Regex Tester - still can’t always tell you what my own regex does, but at least I can test it now
- Timestamp Converter - for when you just need to know what 1722758400 actually is
- Certificate Viewer - makes it easy to check that cert info without having to remember the openssl command line syntax that changes on every platform
- QR Code Generator - no real reason, I just like it
There’s plenty more on there too. Base64 encoding, URI and HTML encoding, JSON compare, text diff, SQL formatting, lorem ipsum, colour picker, UUID generator, hash generator, number base converter, word count and all sorts. Full list is right here.
More tools keep getting added. And if there’s something you keep needing a decent version of, yell out. It’s probably already on the list or it soon will be.
Anyway. That’s the update. Took me nine years but I got round to it eventually.
Now if you’ll excuse me, the brain’s full again and there’s a mortgage to pay off so back to the coal mine… hopefully be back in less than 9 years this time.