DEV Community: Brandon Fowler

Terminal Art

Brandon Fowler — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:57:47 +0000

Hey yall, made a cool little terminal app the other day. Since most terminals can't display images or set pixels, my app converts images into special Unicode characters and ANSI colors to render an image roughly in the terminal.

I find this kind of handy to inspect images in the terminal without having to open another window to view them.

I wrote this in C which was kind of fun. I think it might have been easier in another language, but I chose C since it's likely to still work in 10 to 20 years with no app maintenance on my part.

Here's the github repo if you'd like to use it or give it try: https://github.com/wbf22/terminal_images

Here's an example image and the result of displaying that image with my app

Thoughts

I think one of my favorite things about C is its unchangingness. Lots of languages have constant updates which often means something you write now won't work in 5 years (at least if your trying to use the most recent language version). Some languages have a better way to lock the language version but it still often makes setup difficult.

Another thing I love about the C community is the emphasis on single header file libraries. These are really convenient as you can just copy them into your project. Then your app won't break when the dependency manager remote is shutdown or moved.

However this system also has drawbacks. Without dependency management, it's much harder to stay up to date with the latest versions of your dependency. This can be more critical for things that have to do with security.

Something I've found working in the industry the past few years is that there's a trade space with dependencies. Using them means faster development and not having to writing boilerplate code. It also means you can piggy-back on other people's expertise, especially when it comes to security. But it also means future tech debt as new versions come and old ones loose support. So it's basically a trade between ease and industry-standards, and longevity.

It's interesting that people used to say that 'hardware comes and goes, but software lives forever'. It kind of feels like now software only lives 5 years, especially when it's built on top of constantly changing dependencies.

In the end, it really depends on what kind of project or system you're making. Are you doing rapid development with constantly changing requirements? Or is this something you want to build and then have last forever? It's good to think about these things when choosing to use frameworks or dependencies.

Unbounded

Brandon Fowler — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:20:59 +0000

This is a submission for the DEV's Worldwide Show and Tell Challenge Presented by Mux

What I Built

Unbounded is an open source visual website editor that lets you export code ready for developers to use.

Features:

free and open source
edit css styles
create and use components
export code
import code
mobile support
classes
animations
css variables
basic templates

My Pitch Video

Demo

editor
github
No login or signup necessary. You can access the editor directly.

The Story Behind It

It seemed like most website builders didn't provide a way to export your project as code. I thought this would be useful for small businesses and startups when they're ready to transition their website to developers.

Technical Highlights

I made the editor completely in Vanilla JS. Vanilla JS is pretty flexible and typically incurs less tech debt than frameworks. I actually made the editor as a single html file so that it can be easily downloaded and used offline.

A Visual HTML Editor to Speed up your Workflow

Brandon Fowler — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 19:32:30 +0000

Recently I created a visual HTML editor that has the following features:

free and open source
edit css styles
create and use components
export code
import code
mobile support
classes
animations
css variables
and a few basic templates

I didn't make this to replace developers (not sure you ever could), but rather to make website building a bit faster.

I do a lot of webdev work, and wanted a way to create a way to make basic pages with a visual editor.

I find that I typically start my projects in this editor so I can quickly get the visuals for the app worked out. Then I export the code and start working out the js logic in vscode or something.

Hope you find this handy, feel free to clone it if you want to make it your own 🌝.

You can also download the editor to use it offline. It's a single html file so it's easy to save and use.

github
editor

It's still pretty new so if you have any suggestions I'd love to here them!