Sloan the DEV Moderator for The DEV Team

Posted on Apr 15

Welcome Thread - v373

Sloan the DEV Moderator · 2026-04-15T13:00:00Z

Leave a comment below to introduce yourself! You can talk about what brought you here, what you're learning, or just a fun fact about yourself. Reply to someone's comment, either with a question or just a hello. 👋 Come back next week to greet our new members so you can one day earn our Warm Welcome Badge !

#welcome

Featuring CSS learners and Rust AI builders

Leave a comment below to introduce yourself! You can talk about what brought you here, what you're learning, or just a fun fact about
yourself.
Reply to someone's comment, either with a question or just a hello. 👋

Come back next week to greet our new members so you can one day earn our Warm Welcome Badge!

Top comments (14)

Shahrima Akter Ripa • Apr 15

Hi! I am Ripa. Now I am learning CSS. Almost finished, just trying to strengthen my site in responsive design. I heard about this from Programming Hero. So here I am.

Ben Halpern The DEV Team • Apr 15

Hey Ripa! Great to have you!!

Ben Halpern The DEV Team • Apr 15

Welcome welcome welcome everyone! Please don't fee shy to comment here or anywhere else on the site with questions, suggestions, whatever.

Roman Kotenko • Apr 15

Hi Dev.to 👋

I'm a Go / Vue dev based in Ukraine, and for the past year I've been building something called Road511 — a REST API that normalizes real-time traffic data from every US state and Canadian province 511 system into one
consistent schema.

Over the next 6–8 weeks I'll publish a deep-dive series about the technical decisions behind it. If you work on data pipelines, API design, geospatial systems, or you've ever tried to integrate 30+ upstream services with 30+
different schemas — this one's for you.

## Why Road511 exists

Every US state and Canadian province runs its own "511" traveler information system — traffic events, road conditions, cameras, DMS signs, rest areas. They all serve the same kinds of data. They all do it differently:

Transnomis JSON — Alaska, Arizona, Manitoba, Nevada, Newfoundland…
ArcGIS FeatureServer — Kentucky, Wyoming, Nova Scotia truck data, FHWA bridges
GraphQL BFF — Colorado, Indiana
Custom XML over C2C — the New England compact (ME / NH / VT)
ASP.NET PageMethods — Mississippi
Protobuf binary with XOR obfuscation — Wyoming
Azure Blob static GeoJSON — North Dakota
Iteris ATIS CDN JSON — Montana, South Dakota
…and about a dozen more one-offs

Want cameras for a cross-state trip? That's five integrations, five auth flows, five update schedules.

Road511 aggregates 80+ source servers into one REST API with a unified schema. One call, one key, one response format.

## What's in the data

57 jurisdictions — 44 US states + 13 Canadian provinces / territories
7 national datasets — FHWA NBI, FHWA National Network, FHWA NHFN, NREL, OSM, EIA, StatCan
10,000+ live traffic cameras with direct image URLs
621,000 bridge clearances (height, weight, condition, inspection dates)
479,000 truck route segments (STAA National Network)
100k+ EV charging stations
DMS sign messages, RWIS weather stations, rest areas, weigh stations, ferries
Seasonal weight restrictions / spring load limits
Weekly US fuel prices + monthly Canadian province prices

Every endpoint has a GeoJSON variant. Drop it into Leaflet or Mapbox and it just works.

## The series

Already published:

How I Normalized 30+ Different 511 Traffic APIs Into One REST Endpoint — the architecture: adapter registry in Go, DB-driven scheduler, per-source circuit breakers, adaptive backoff.

Coming up — expect one post per week:

Real-Time Traffic Camera Feeds via API — how we serve 10k+ cameras without being a CDN
Bridge Clearance Data API for Fleet Routing — the FHWA NBI 621k-bridge dataset
Real-Time DMS Sign Messages API — the one data type no competitor serves
GeoJSON Traffic Events API with BBox and Radius Queries — PostGIS spatial query design
Spring Load Limits API for Trucking Compliance — six state websites collapsed into one endpoint
How to Build a Traffic Dashboard with Road511 + Leaflet — full tutorial
Comparing Traffic Data APIs: Road511 vs HERE vs TomTom vs INRIX — what each one is actually good at
Fuel Price API for Fleet Cost Planning — EIA + StatCan normalized

Follow the series tag (sidebar, right) if you want new posts to land in your feed automatically.

## Stack

Backend — Go (chi, pgx v5, slog, DB-backed log handler), PostgreSQL 18 + PostGIS 3.5, Redis 8 (nil-safe)
Frontend — Vue 3 + Vite + Pinia + Leaflet for the public map, Tailwind on admin + portal SPAs
Scheduler — single binary, DB-driven, 523 registered fetch functions across 76 adapter files, per-source rate limiting + circuit breakers
Payments — Paddle (live)
Two binaries — cmd/api (public API + customer portal) and cmd/worker (scheduler + adapters + admin)

## Try it

Live map — map.road511.com (no signup)
API docs — docs.road511.com
Free tier — portal.road511.com (no credit card)
Code examples — github.com/Road511/road511-examples (Go / Python / JS / curl)

If there's a 511 system I haven't covered, a feature you wish existed, or a data source I should look at — drop it in the comments. I'm actively building and this series will shift based on what people actually want.

See you in the next post.

Stacey Schneider • Apr 15

Hola! I am Stacey, cofounder of an AI company, PromptOwl (promptowl.ai) and the open source project Context Nest (github.com/PromptOwl/ContextNest).

We founded PromptOwl to study and build the things that enterprises will need to run grown-up AI — context management, governance, security, and making real agents with tools and context and auditing from regular language. And all the plumbing to make it not fall over or hallucinate.

I have been in the AI/ML arena for nearly 15 years, and know instantly that AI is currently built for individual use, and even then it isn't optimized. The enterprise has a real gap to cover before they can embrace AI unfettered.

The interesting problem isn't the model anymore. It's everything around it—the context architecture that lets your AI know what it's allowed to see, the governance that keeps it from hallucinating, the security that makes auditing possible, the development practices that work when you're building systems that are part AI and part traditional code.

I'll be writing about that here on Dev.to—the infrastructure layer that separates prototype from production.

Hermetic Dev • Apr 15

Hey everyone! 👋

I'm building Hermetic — an Agent-Isolated credential broker for AI coding agents, written in Rust.

The problem: if you use Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible IDE, your API keys sit in plaintext config files. If the agent gets compromised, every credential is exposed.

Hermetic fixes this: the daemon makes the API call on the agent's behalf and returns only the response. The agent never sees the credential. Domain binding ensures a Stripe key can only be sent to api.stripe.com — the agent can't override it.

Just published my first blog post here — an analysis of GitHub's new AI agent security game (Secure Code Game Season 4) where I mapped every level's vulnerability against credential isolation:

dev.to/hermetic3243/i-played-githu...

Currently: zero users, lots of tests (1,040+, 1.7B fuzz executions), and figuring out how to get people to actually try it. Happy to connect with anyone working on AI agent security or Rust tooling.

GitHub: github.com/hermetic-sys/Hermetic

Bobby Rivera • Apr 15

Hi, I'm Bobby. I'm a full-stack web developer, and over the next year, I'm going to work on a series of side projects I've been meaning to tackle. It's going to be a series of blogs recording my progress. Feel free to ask me anything!