DEV Community: shi warren

AI makes building faster, but semantic distribution is now the hard part

shi warren — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:49:33 +0000

Shipping products feels dramatically easier now.

Between AI coding tools, templates, and browser-side tooling, I can build and deploy things faster than ever.

But distribution feels harder.

Not technically harder.

Semantically harder.

A lot of the work now is:

understanding how users actually search
matching workflows instead of technical terms
figuring out where intent really exists
building trust before distribution channels suppress you

Building became compressed.

Attention became fragmented.

Honestly feels like distribution is becoming the real product skill now.

Most people search “remove location from photo”, not “EXIF”

shi warren — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:49:20 +0000

Most people search “remove location from photo”, not “EXIF”

While building a metadata removal workflow, I realized something interesting:

Most people never search for:

EXIF
IPTC
document properties
metadata

They search for:

“remove location from photo”
“hidden info in PDF”
“remove GPS from image”
“does this file still contain private data?”

The technical layer and the user intent layer are often completely different.

Developers think in systems.

Users think in outcomes.

That changed how I started thinking about both SEO and product design.

A lot of users are not trying to “inspect metadata”.

They’re usually just at the moment before sharing something publicly and wondering:

“wait… is there still something hidden in this file?”

Your photos may still contain GPS metadata after editing

shi warren — Sat, 09 May 2026 17:09:15 +0000

A lot of people assume cropping, resizing, or screenshotting a photo removes hidden information.

That’s often not true.

Many images still contain metadata like:

GPS location
device information
timestamps
camera details
EXIF data

In some cases that can unintentionally expose:

where a photo was taken
what device was used
when it was captured

I started noticing this more while working with:

screenshots
AI-generated images
product demos
travel photos
shared work files

One thing that surprised me is how many people don’t realize metadata exists until they accidentally leak something.

Privacy tooling on the internet still feels mostly reactive instead of preventative.

I think lightweight browser-side privacy workflows will become much more important as AI-generated and shared content keeps increasing.

How to Convert JSON to Excel Online

shi warren — Sat, 09 May 2026 17:04:37 +0000

JSON is great for APIs and structured data, but reviewing large responses in raw format gets painful fast.

I kept running into this while debugging APIs, checking exported records, and reviewing nested logs.

Most of the time, I didn’t actually need the raw JSON. I needed something readable.

Converting JSON into a spreadsheet ended up being the fastest workflow for things like:

API debugging
exported records
nested logs
sharing structured data with non-technical teams

One thing I noticed is that nested JSON matters a lot more than people expect. A lot of converters technically work, but still leave deeply nested fields unreadable.

So I built a lightweight browser-side workflow for flattening JSON into readable spreadsheet columns.

It supports:

JSON → XLSX
nested JSON flattening
browser-side processing
no signup

I also added XLS export because some older Excel workflows still depend on it.