DEV Community

Cover image for Welcome Thread - v373

Welcome Thread - v373

Sloan the DEV Moderator on April 15, 2026

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. Re...
Collapse
 
shahrima_ripa profile image
Shahrima Akter Ripa

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.

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern The DEV Team

Hey Ripa! Great to have you!!

Collapse
 
hema_nambi_66c9 profile image
Hemalatha Nambiradje

welcome Ripa!

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern The DEV Team

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

Collapse
 
road511 profile image
Roman Kotenko

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:

Coming up — expect one post per week:

  1. Real-Time Traffic Camera Feeds via API — how we serve 10k+ cameras without being a CDN
  2. Bridge Clearance Data API for Fleet Routing — the FHWA NBI 621k-bridge dataset
  3. Real-Time DMS Sign Messages API — the one data type no competitor serves
  4. GeoJSON Traffic Events API with BBox and Radius Queries — PostGIS spatial query design
  5. Spring Load Limits API for Trucking Compliance — six state websites collapsed into one endpoint
  6. How to Build a Traffic Dashboard with Road511 + Leaflet — full tutorial
  7. Comparing Traffic Data APIs: Road511 vs HERE vs TomTom vs INRIX — what each one is actually good at
  8. 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 binariescmd/api (public API + customer portal) and cmd/worker (scheduler + adapters + admin)

## Try it

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.

Collapse
 
areyoudoneyetbobby profile image
Bobby Rivera

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!

Collapse
 
hermetic3243 profile image
Hermetic Dev

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

Collapse
 
staceyeschneider profile image
Stacey Schneider

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.

Collapse
 
hema_nambi_66c9 profile image
Hemalatha Nambiradje

Hi DEV Community!
I’m Hema — a SDET with 9 years of experience in software testing and quality engineering. I’ve recently started learning machine learning, generative AI, and responsible AI from a QA perspective, and I’m documenting my journey learning in public.
I regularly share my learnings and AI‑focused QA insights on my blog as well:
hemaai.hashnode.dev/
Excited to be part of the DEV community and to learn, share, and grow together. Feedback and conversations are always welcome! 😊

Collapse
 
tangerine4home profile image
Vincent Tan

Hi everyone,

New to the scene and loving it here. Hope to learn as much as I could in here.

Collapse
 
ola_the_builder profile image
Oladapo Anjolaiya

Hi folks!, sharing finding I find day-to-day in engineering. I love to hike!

Collapse
 
entflow profile image
Entflow - Workflow Mapper

Hello, Entflow here! Ready to rock & roll your Hubspot portals 🫡

Collapse
 
sri_balagi profile image
SRI BALAGI

Hi, I am Sri balagi. I am AI&DS undergraduate and am delighted to get into this community. Interested in finding out what i can learn from here.

Collapse
 
kkthegod profile image
kavinkarthikeyan321

hi. i am kk now i know c,c++ and python and i am 11

Collapse
 
wrench profile image
Wrench

Hi, dev.to!
Building something and may find some answers here :)

Collapse
 
austin_495830e profile image
Austin

I am Maneesh from India,

Collapse
 
terrizoaguimor profile image
Mario Gutierrez

HEY! Just a guy from Venezuela, living in Medellín, no fancy education, teaching myself AI through trial and error. ADHD keeps me grinding; coffee keeps me going.

Collapse
 
_2b847605e5fbe8a8c9e26 profile image
Charlie Li

Hello!

Collapse
 
pizzaprompt profile image
PizzaPrompt

Hello everyone!

Collapse
 
aayush_kumarsingh_6ee1ffe profile image
Aayush kumarsingh

Hi everyone 👋
I’m Aayush Kumar, a software developer passionate about building and learning new things.