PocketArCBookmarks
In the same vein as the ‘awesome [thing]’ lists you've seen everywhere, instead of bookmarking websites and never revisiting them, I'm collecting all the links I find useful here (easy to quickly Cmd-F!). Inspired by Giles Turnbull's Shoebox.
This is very much a work in progress, not an exhaustive list (yet!).
Richardson Maturity Model
Classic Martin Fowler article on REST API maturity levels: Level 0 (HTTP as transport), Level 1 (resources), Level 2 (HTTP verbs), Level 3 (HATEOAS).
https://martinfowler.com/articles/richardsonMaturityModel.htmlPublic Suffix List
All known public suffixes (TLDs and effective TLDs like co.uk). Used for domain parsing, cookie handling, and security boundaries.
https://publicsuffix.org/list/HTML5 Bones
Minimalist HTML5 template from the IE8 era. html5shiv, Normalize.css, WAI-ARIA roles. Not much use now beyond nostalgia.
http://html5bones.com/Wordnik API
API for word definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, examples, and random word generation.
https://developer.wordnik.com/docsGit Flow
Vincent Driessen's 2010 branching model that shaped how teams think about Git. I remember when that was new and revolutionary. Still a useful reference for understanding Git workflows.
https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/Unicode CLDR
Common Locale Data Repository. Most i18n things (dates, currencies, plurals) are already solved. Check here before rolling your own.
https://cldr.unicode.orgGamma
AI-powered presentations for the times you can't refuse giving one at work.
https://gamma.appExercism
Practice programming in 73 languages with human mentoring. I'm not sure how actually useful it is, but it seems pretty cool.
https://exercism.orgRocket
Mind-blowing emoji picker for Mac.
https://matthewpalmer.net/rocketChecklist for changing your data model in a web application
A checklist for zero-downtime migrations. First step is to decouple migrations from deployments; they should not be part of the same process.
https://rtpg.co/2021/06/07/changes-checklist.htmlApple Password Rules
How to give password generators guidance on what to include in a password.
https://developer.apple.com/password-rules/The Handbook Directory
A directory of internal onboarding/cultural corporate handbooks.
https://handbook.directory/Prompt Engineering Guide
A guide to prompt engineering, with a focus on the latest research and techniques.
https://www.promptingguide.ai/Random Things to Do
A fun generator of random things to do in different categories.
https://randomthingstodo.com/A taxonomy of tech debt
Bill Clark discusses classifying and managing tech debt at Riot. Classifying tech debt by type makes it easier to prioritize and manage.
https://technology.riotgames.com/news/taxonomy-tech-debtModern Font Stacks
A collection of system font stacks organized by typeface classification for every modern OS.
https://modernfontstacks.com/Built for Mars
A library of UX case studies, cheatsheets, design psychology and examples.
https://builtformars.comThe Most Officialest SkiFree Home Page!
SkiFree! The classic game from the 90s. Hadn't thought of it in ages, then came across this site and wanted to bookmark it.
https://ski.ihoc.net/Cry Once a Week
A website dedicated to helping you have a good cry for stress relief. It's all videos, and it does work.
https://www.cryonceaweek.comProxyman
A modern HTTP debugging proxy for inspecting, intercepting, and modifying network traffic. Came across it after seeing HN discussion about alternatives to Charles Proxy.
https://proxyman.comTints
Generate 11-color Tailwind CSS palettes from a single hex color. Supports oklch, hex, and hsl exports, plus an API for programmatic access.
https://tints.devASCII Clouds
Interactive ASCII art generator using Perlin noise. Renders animated cloud patterns with customizable wave, color, and threshold settings. Very cool.
https://caidan.dev/portfolio/ascii_clouds/Laws of UX
Collection of ~30 UX design principles (Fitts's Law, Hick's Law, Miller's Law, etc.) with explanations.
https://lawsofux.com/Mochi
Spaced repetition flashcard app with markdown notes. Local-first, cross-platform. Alternative to Anki with a more modern interface and workflow.
https://mochi.cards/Pixel Snapper
Automatically fixes messy or blurry pixels into a perfect pixel grid. Great for cleaning up AI-generated pixel art. Free and open source.
https://www.spritefusion.com/pixel-snapperOpen-Meteo
Free weather API, no key required. High-resolution forecasts, 80 years historical data, air quality, marine, geocoding. Free for non-commercial use.
https://open-meteo.comGuesstimate
Spreadsheet for uncertain values. Enter confidence intervals, get Monte Carlo simulations. I love their UX for this, it's so good for forecasting with value ranges.
https://www.getguesstimate.com/ASCII Characters Are Not Pixels
Beautifully crafted technical post on image-to-ASCII rendering. Interactive 3D demos, draggable sliders, progressive problem-solution structure. I hope for my technical writing to one day be as good as this.
https://alexharri.com/blog/ascii-renderingDeckbox
Magic: The Gathering collection manager and trading platform.
https://deckbox.org/JustWatch
Find where movies and TV shows are streaming. Search across a bunch of streaming services.
https://www.justwatch.com/OSHub
Hobby OS development hub. Discover kernels, bootloaders, and hobby operating systems. Publish projects and devlogs.
https://oshub.org/The True Size Of...
Drag countries around the map to compare their true sizes. Visualizes Mercator projection distortion. Surreal to see how country sizes really compare when you can move them around.
https://thetruesize.com/Stay SaaSy Guides
Guides for scaling product & engineering teams from $0 to $100M ARR. Executive leadership, product management, engineering management.
https://staysaasy.com/guides.htmlYour Data Fits in RAM
Enter your data size, find out if it fits in RAM. A reminder of just how massive a single server actually is these days.
https://yourdatafitsinram.net/Ingredients of an All-Natural Egg
Infographic listing every chemical in an egg. A reminder that 'chemicals' aren't inherently scary. Kind of like the DHMO joke.
https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ingredients-of-an-all-natural-egg2.jpgGit Mailmap
Map author/committer names and emails to canonical versions. Useful for cleaning up git history attribution.
https://git-scm.com/docs/gitmailmapTunarr
Create classic live TV channels from your Plex/Jellyfin/Emby media. Schedule content like real TV with filler and commercials. I want to use it to build 80s and 90s TV stations for myself.
https://github.com/chrisbenincasa/tunarrKagi Search Stats
Global stats on pinned and blocked sites across Kagi users. Shows the power of community-driven search result curation.
https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboardDiataxis
Documentation framework: tutorials, how-to guides, reference, explanation. Four modes of documentation for different user needs. Very very useful way to think about documentation structure and content strategy.
https://diataxis.fr/The Elements of APIs
A decent API design guide: contracts, resources, versioning, authentication, etc.
https://johnholdun.com/apis/Zotero
Free reference management software for collecting, organizing, and citing research sources.
https://www.zotero.org/Procedural Map Generation
Overview of map generation techniques: Voronoi polygons, Lloyd relaxation, flood fill. Links to Amit's polygon map tutorial.
https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/4031/methods-for-generating-a-mapRelative Time Element
GitHub's web component for auto-updating relative timestamps. Server caches HTML, browser localizes to user's timezone.
https://github.com/github/relative-time-elementSafe PHP
PHP functions rewritten to throw exceptions instead of returning false. No more checking return values, just try/catch.
https://github.com/thecodingmachine/safechezmoi
Dotfiles manager. Sync personal config across machines with templating, secrets support, and multi-machine handling.
https://www.chezmoi.io/Draggable Objects
Deep-dive on implementing drag with pointer events. Covers pitfalls, constraints via setters, and treating clicks as zero-movement drags.
https://www.redblobgames.com/making-of/draggable/The Spam Chronicles
ChatGPT automatically replies to spam emails and wastes scammers' time. The conversations are hilarious.
https://thespamchronicles.stavros.io/Novelty Answering Machine Archive
The world's largest archive of novelty answering machine greetings from the 80s/90s. Pure nostalgia.
http://www.noveltyansweringmachine.com/audio/index.htmlTech Company Org Charts
The famous satirical comic: Amazon's hierarchy, Google's chaos, Microsoft's warring silos, Apple orbiting Jobs, Oracle's giant Legal dept.
https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-chartsVale
Linter for prose. Checks writing style, grammar, and terminology consistency in docs and technical writing.
https://vale.sh/Sent.dm
Unified messaging API. One endpoint for SMS, WhatsApp, iMessage, Viber, RCS. Auto-detects channels, handles fallbacks, 80-90% cheaper than pure SMS.
https://sent.dm/Type-Safe Object IDs in TypeScript
Branded types for IDs so you can't mix up UserId with PostId. Catches bugs at compile time.
https://www.kravchyk.com/adding-type-safety-to-object-ids-typescript/Visions of the Future
NASA JPL's retro-style travel posters for exoplanets and space destinations. Beautiful vintage aesthetic.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/visions-of-the-future/YC Startup Library
15+ years of Y Combinator content: essays, talks, videos on fundraising, pitching, growth, sales, and building companies.
https://www.ycombinator.com/libraryGitLab Product Personas
GitLab's detailed product personas: Sasha (Software Developer), Parker (Product Manager), etc. Good reference for how to document user personas.
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/personas/Afterplay
Play retro games on any device. Browser-based emulator for classic consoles.
https://afterplay.io/VisiData
Terminal-based spreadsheet for data exploration. Opens CSV, handles millions of rows, instant histograms, scatterplots in terminal. Badass CLI tool.
https://www.visidata.org/Marmoset Hexels
Grid-based painting tool using geometric shapes. Creates pixel art, vector art, isometric designs, animations. Painterly workflow with vector precision.
https://marmoset.co/hexels/Free for Developers
Curated list of developer tools with free tiers. More valuable as a discovery resource than for the 'free' part: it's a well-organized catalog of SaaS, PaaS, IaaS by category.
https://free-for.dev/Lighthouse PHP
GraphQL framework for Laravel. SDL-first with directives that map to Eloquent relationships (@hasMany, @belongsTo, @paginate). Zero boilerplate.
https://lighthouse-php.com/lite-youtube-embed
Web component that renders YouTube embeds 224× faster. Lazy-loads the player on click, uses youtube-nocookie.com for privacy. By Paul Irish.
https://github.com/paulirish/lite-youtube-embedRay.so
Create beautiful code screenshots with syntax highlighting, themes, and export options. By the Raycast team.
https://ray.so/Scorecard
Beautiful iOS app for tracking scores in board games, card games, and sports. Clean UI.
https://www.getscorecard.app/PHP-Nuke
Demo site for PHP-Nuke, the classic early-2000s portal CMS. Web 1.0 nostalgia.
https://www.opensourcecms.com/php-nuke/Toxiproxy
TCP proxy for simulating network failures in tests. Add latency, bandwidth limits, timeouts, connection resets. By Shopify.
https://github.com/shopify/toxiproxyActive GitHub Forks
Find the most active forks of any GitHub repo. Useful when the original project is abandoned.
https://techgaun.github.io/active-forks/index.htmlTextFiles.com
Jason Scott's archive of 1980s BBS-era textfiles, ASCII art, and digital history. A cornerstone of web preservation.
http://www.textfiles.com/Local-First Software
Seminal Ink & Switch essay on building software where users own their data. CRDTs, offline-first, real-time collaboration without sacrificing ownership.
https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/Interactive Guide to CSS Keyframe Animations
Josh Comeau's excellent guide to @keyframes. Timing functions, loops, fill modes, multi-step animations, CSS variables. Interactive playgrounds.
https://www.joshwcomeau.com/animation/keyframe-animations/Terragen
Photorealistic 3D environment rendering. Used by ILM, Weta, Digital Domain for film VFX. I made scenes with this as a kid.
https://planetside.co.uk/Mozilla Web Security Guidelines
Web security reference. TLS, HSTS, CSP, CORS, cookies, CSRF, referrer policy, SRI. Examples and implementation notes.
https://infosec.mozilla.org/guidelines/web_securityCommand-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster
Classic demonstration that simple shell pipelines (cat/grep/awk/xargs) can process 3.5GB in 12 seconds vs 26 minutes on Hadoop. A reminder to reach for the right tool, not the trendy one.
https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your-hadoop-cluster.htmlWeb Interface Guidelines
Vercel's checklist for building quality web interfaces. Covers interactions, animations, layout, content, forms, performance, and design. Hundreds of small decisions that make interfaces succeed.
https://vercel.com/design/guidelinesuPlot
Tiny (~50KB) Canvas 2D charting library for time series. Renders 166,650 points in 25ms, streams at 60fps. Crushes Chart.js/ECharts/Plotly on benchmarks.
https://github.com/leeoniya/uPlotTechnical.City GPU Rankings
GPU performance rankings. Compares desktop, notebook, and workstation cards by benchmark scores. Updated regularly.
https://technical.city/en/video/ratingSquoosh
Browser-based image optimizer from Google Chrome Labs. Compare and compress with different codecs (WebP, AVIF, MozJPEG) in real-time.
https://squoosh.app/Mozilla HTTP Observatory
Scan any site for security headers (CSP, HSTS, X-Frame-Options, SRI). Scores your site and gives actionable recommendations.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/observatoryPersonal Status Pages
Merlin Mann's 2005 idea: people should have status pages like sites do. Show current projects, inbox count, now playing, availability.
http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/19/personal-status-pageCSS 3D Adventure Game
Full 3D dungeon crawler rendered entirely in CSS/HTML. Features lighting, shadows, geometry culling using CSS transforms. Impressive demo of what's possible without WebGL.
https://pantel.is/projects/css3d/EICAR Test File
Standard 68-byte test string for antivirus software. A legitimate DOS executable that prints text, used to test AV without real malware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_fileSaturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Daily webcomic by Zach Weinersmith. Science, philosophy, relationships, absurdist humor. One of the best long-running webcomics.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/color × color
Create accessible color palettes using Okhsl or HSLuv. Perceptually uniform colors with fine-grained control over hue, saturation, and lightness curves.
https://colorcolor.in/LocalStack
Run AWS locally. Emulates 100+ AWS services (S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, etc.) for dev and testing without cloud costs. 60k+ GitHub stars, endorsed by Mitchell Hashimoto.
https://localstack.cloud/FreeDNS
Free dynamic DNS service. Get subdomains on thousands of shared domains or host your own. Classic service, been around forever.
https://freedns.afraid.org/Traccar
Free open-source GPS tracking platform. Self-hosted or cloud, supports 100s of device protocols. Real-time tracking, alerts, reports.
https://www.traccar.org/Google Authenticator PAM
Add TOTP 2FA to SSH and other PAM-enabled services. Works with any authenticator app.
https://github.com/google/google-authenticator-libpamexplain.depesz.com
PostgreSQL EXPLAIN ANALYZE visualizer. Paste query plan, get colorized breakdown of costs, times, buffers.
https://explain.depesz.com/Bullshit.js
Bookmarklet that highlights marketing buzzwords on any webpage. Reveals corporate speak in all its glory.
https://mourner.github.io/bullshit.js/oha
Rust-based HTTP load generator. Simple CLI, nice latency percentile output. Modern alternative to wrk/ab for quick benchmarking.
https://github.com/hatoo/ohaUp-Goer Five Text Editor
Write using only the 1000 most common English words. Inspired by XKCD #1133. Great exercise for explaining complex concepts simply.
https://splasho.com/upgoer5/Frutiger Aero Archive
Digital museum of 2000s tech aesthetics. 4000+ wallpapers, music, videos, icons from the glossy UI era. Windows Vista/7, PS3, Wii, iDog, skeuomorphism, bubbles, bokeh, and grass. Mid-2000s nostalgia.
https://frutigeraeroarchive.org/GeoNames
Free geographical database with 11M+ placenames in all countries. Downloads and web services for geocoding, postal codes, and location data. Creative Commons license.
http://www.geonames.org/HTML5 Security Cheatsheet
Community-maintained catalogue of XSS and HTML5 attack vectors. Covers HTML5-specific vectors, CSS injection, SVG, clickjacking, with browser compat and fix recommendations.
https://html5sec.org/phpunit-query-count-assertions
Laravel/PHPUnit package by Mattias Geniar (Oh Dear) that asserts query efficiency in tests: no N+1, no duplicates, all queries use indexes (via EXPLAIN). Caught 15% of redundant SELECTs at Oh Dear. Works with MySQL, MariaDB, and SQLite.
https://github.com/mattiasgeniar/phpunit-query-count-assertionsSWR
React hooks for data fetching by Vercel. Returns cached (stale) data first, then revalidates with a fresh fetch. Handy for instant-feeling UIs that tolerate brief staleness.
https://swr.vercel.appSlidev
Presentation slides for developers by Anthony Fu. Write slides in Markdown, powered by Vue and Vite. Alternative to Reveal.js.
https://sli.dev