DEV Community: Rayan Ahmad

I built this for myself. Then realised other devs probably had the same problem.

Rayan Ahmad — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 06:03:10 +0000

A few months ago I pasted a .env file into a random online converter. Got my output, moved on. It wasn't until later that it actually hit me: that file had a real database password in it. I'd just sent production credentials to a server I knew nothing about, run by someone I'd never heard of.
I checked a few other tools I used regularly. Most of them worked the same way. Thin frontend, backend doing the actual processing, no clear answer on what happens to your input after you get your result back.
So I just built my own versions. Started with the env converter since that's what triggered it. Then added a crontab to systemd converter because I kept needing that too. Then a CIDR calculator, a PII log scrubber, a CSV to JSON Schema builder. Everything runs entirely in the browser, nothing leaves your machine, you can verify it yourself by opening the network tab or just going offline mid-session.
Shared it with a couple of friends who do similar work. Both said they'd actually use it. So I cleaned it up and put it online properly.
Still early, no users to speak of yet. But it's live at configdev.com if anyone wants to check it out or tell me where the client-side claim breaks down.
Happy to share more about how any of the tools work if there's interest.

Built a suite of client-side dev tools to fix the "production data" privacy gap

Rayan Ahmad — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 05:21:53 +0000

As a student dev, I kept hitting the same wall: needing quick infra tasks done (formatting .env files, CIDR subnetting, log scrubbing) but most free online tools want you to upload your data to their backend first.
That's a hard no for production env vars or PII-heavy logs.
So I built ConfigDev to avoid that entirely, it runs 100% client-side (in-browser, V8 memory), zero network calls, no server processing, no telemetry. Basically an offline-first utility suite for anyone who cares about not sending sensitive data anywhere.
Two things I'd genuinely love feedback on:

The no-server approach: does this actually solve a real pain point in your workflow, or is it solving a problem people don't have?
Local-first UX: any ideas on handling larger datasets client-side without choking the browser thread?

How much time does Google takes to index your webpages

Rayan Ahmad — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 04:36:09 +0000

I submitted my new webiste sitemap to Google Search Console it's been around 30 hrs, still my webpages are not indexed except Homepage and there are no issues in the pages. I can clearly see that there are no issues. in GSC(status: success, discovered pages:11) but pages are not indexed.

Why I stopped using online utilities for my env variables

Rayan Ahmad — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 06:40:39 +0000

A few weeks ago I needed to quickly convert a .env file to JSON for a script. Did what I always do, opened the first free converter tool that came up, pasted the file in, got my output, moved on. It wasn't until later that night that it actually registered: that file had a real database password in it. I'd just pasted production-adjacent credentials into a random website with no idea what happens to that input after I hit submit.
That's the thing about most free online dev tools. The formatters, converters, calculators we all reach for to save five minutes are usually thin frontends sitting in front of a backend that does the actual processing. Sometimes that's disclosed somewhere in a privacy policy. Often it isn't, or the policy is vague enough that it doesn't really tell you anything. Either way, whatever you paste in gets sent off your machine before you get a result back, and the only thing standing between that data and a server log somewhere is whatever the site operator decided to do with it.
For a lot of use cases that's a non-issue. Converting a snippet of CSS to SCSS doesn't expose much if it ends up in a log somewhere. But infra and devops tooling is a different category of input entirely. A crontab can reveal internal job names and what your systems actually do on a schedule. An env file often has real connection strings, API keys, or credentials in it. A log dump can have customer PII scattered through it. None of that is data I want leaving my machine just to save myself a few minutes of manual parsing.
So I started looking at what it would actually take to do these conversions entirely client-side, no backend involved at all. It changes more than you'd expect. There's no submit button, because there's no request to submit, results just have to update live as you type. There's no async loading state to lean on. Every parser has to run synchronously (or in a local worker) directly against whatever's in the input field, fast enough that it doesn't feel laggy on every keystroke, and robust enough to not choke on partial or malformed input while someone's still typing.
If you want to check whether a tool's "client-side" claim actually holds up, it's easy to verify yourself. Open dev tools, go to the Network tab, then paste something into the tool and watch for outbound requests. If the tool also lets you select a file instead of pasting, try that path too, a genuine local file read via the browser's File API won't trigger any network activity either. Or just disconnect from the internet entirely and see if the tool still works. If a "file upload" button doesn't actually make a request anywhere, it was never really an upload, it's just a local file read, and that's a meaningfully different thing from what most "upload" UI implies.
I ended up building a small set of tools around this exact problem, things like crontab-to-systemd conversion, env-to-JSON and back, a CIDR subnet calculator, and a PII log scrubber, all running fully in-browser at configdev.com. Built them mostly because I kept needing them myself and didn't want to keep pasting real config into tools I had no visibility into.
This isn't really meant to be a pitch for that specific project though. It's more of a habit I'd recommend picking up regardless of what tool you end up using: before pasting anything sensitive into a website, check the network tab first. Takes ten seconds and tells you exactly where your data is actually going.