DEV Community: Muhammad Usman

Why Settle for a Boring Internet When We Can Build Something Unforgettable?

Muhammad Usman — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:14:40 +0000

For the past 5 years, I’ve been designing, developing, and optimizing WordPress websites with just one goal in mind, making them perform in search.

I’ve always been fascinated by how a few well-chosen and well-written words can make a website come alive in search results. To me, SEO isn’t just about rankings, it’s all about a mix of curiosity, problem-solving, and storytelling.

I love digging into analytics like a detective, always experimenting with strategies, and seeing the absolute great results in real-time.

Each success have taught me something new about human behavior and search patterns of every platform. When I’m not optimizing websites, I’m always exploring new trends, testing new tools, or writing content that connects with real people.

I’ve spent the last 5 years in designing and developing websites that don’t just look good, but actually performs very well in search engines. As for me, SEO always comes first, making sites fast, secure, and responsive.

Then shifting in the technical work like Core Web Vitals, site architecture, and schema markup. Along the way, I’ve tested on page and off-page strategies, fine-tuned speed, and seen the results in real numbers organic traffic tripling, business priority keywords slowly climbing into the top 3, and clean builds that both Google and real users trust, and don’t forget other search engines and AI as well.

My work goes far beyond just visuals, it has a deep technical as well. I focus on building clean, scalable WordPress Websites using custom themes, optimized PHP functions, and absolutely lightweight CSS/JS frameworks to keep performance tight.

Every element I have developed so far is designed to load fast, pass Core Web Vitals, and maintain the long-term stability. I regularly work with WP GraphQL, REST APIs, and custom post types to create flexible, content-driven backends that integrate smoothly with frontend frameworks.

And building fully custom WooCommerce stores to handling complex product logic, I always prioritize clean, maintainable code that’s built to last longer than ever. On the SEO side, I focus on the foundation indexing structure, schema markup, canonicalization, XML sitemaps, and crawl efficiency. I run technical audits, fix rendering issues, and making sure that every site communicates clearly with search engines and your users.

Every project is backed by performance monitoring, CDN setup, caching, and DNS-level optimization to keep sites absolutely fast and stable. I’ve spent years refining my skill and workflow around speed, structure, and scalability, the three pillars of every truly high-performing website.

Anthropic Just Dropped the Bomb on AI called Claude Mythos.

Muhammad Usman — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:18:01 +0000

They built the most powerful AI model in history. It can hack better than any human alive. So they refused to release it.

A researcher was eating a sandwich in a park when his phone buzzed. It was an email from an AI he had locked in a sealed sandbox with zero internet access. The model had found a way out on its own.

That model is Claude Mythos Preview. And I genuinely think this might be the most important AI announcement of 2026.

It is not because of what it does for you and me right now. Because of what it reveals about what Anthropic actually has sitting in their labs.

So, what is Project Glasswing?

Earlier this week, Anthropic announced something called Project Glasswing. Buried inside that announcement is a model called Claude Mythos Preview.

This model is not available to you or me. It is not on the API. You cannot buy access. There is no waitlist. And there is a very specific reason for that.

This model can find and exploit software vulnerabilities better than any hacker alive. Better than every human security expert on earth. And Anthropic built it.

Their response was not to release it and charge everyone for access. Their response was to partner with basically every major tech company in the world and use it to patch the internet before the bad guys figure out how to build the same thing.

That is a fundamentally different kind of move.

The Partners and the Money

The coalition behind Glasswing includes AWS, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JP Morgan, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Paloalto Networks.

If you know anything about the tech industry, that list should stop you cold. That is every major player in security and infrastructure sitting at the same table for the same reason.

They have committed over $100 million in usage credits to this project. On top of that, Anthropic put $4 million directly into open-source security organizations and gave 40 additional organizations access to scan their own systems using this model.

Companies do not write nine-figure checks for a press release. They wrote those checks because Claude Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major browser. Things sitting on your machine right now that no human security team had found yet.

Anthropic is essentially saying, "We found the holes before the bad guys found all of them." Now let us get them fixed.

What the Benchmark Numbers Actually Look Like

Agentic search and computer use

The gap between Mythos and Opus 4.6, Anthropic’s current best public model, is not incremental. It is a different category entirely.

Agentic Coding

On a single benchmark test developing exploits for Mozilla’s Firefox JavaScript engine, Opus 4.6 succeeded twice out of hundreds of attempts. Mythos succeeded 181 times. It also achieved full register control on 29 additional attempts on top of that.

Reasoning

On Anthropic’s internal crash severity benchmark, Opus 4.6 hit the highest tier exactly once. Mythos hit it ten times on fully patched targets.

It found zero-day vulnerabilities, bugs nobody knew existed, in every major operating system and every major browser. The oldest bug it uncovered was a 27-year-old vulnerability in OpenBSD, an operating system built specifically around security. That bug has since been patched.

And when human security experts reviewed its vulnerability reports, they agreed with Mythos’s severity rating 89% of the time exactly. In 98% of cases they were within one severity level.

That is not an update. That is a completely different ceiling.

The Real Story Here

Here is what I actually want to talk about, because the security story is real and important, but it is not the whole story.

The real story is what this announcement tells us about Anthropic’s capabilities right now.

Think about it this way. The models we use today, Claude Sonnet, Claude Opus, those are what Anthropic deemed safe and ready for millions of people. But Mythos is not one of those. Mythos is something they built, and immediately decided this one does not go public.

That means Anthropic has models in their lab right now that are significantly more capable than anything you or I have access to. That is not me reading between the lines. That is literally what they just announced.

The public Claude is not the best Claude. It never has been. But this is the first time we have gotten a concrete signal about exactly how big that gap is.

What This Means for Builders

If you are building with AI right now, this is genuinely exciting news.

Every time a new Claude release goes public, it is not the newest thing Anthropic has. It is the thing they decided was ready. There is always a layer of capability above the public release that they are still red-teaming, still evaluating, and still figuring out how to make safe before it goes out to millions of people.

That internal-to-external gap is probably getting wider over time, not narrower. Which means the public Claude releases coming at the end of this year are being built on internal foundations that already exceed what we are currently imagining.

The people who are genuinely building habits around these tools today will have a real head start when those more capable public releases arrive. The gap between people who are actually building with AI and people watching from the sidelines is getting much bigger. Glasswing makes that undeniable.

What We Do Not Know

I want to be straight with you here because I think that matters.

We do not know the specific architecture. We do not know the costs, which could be a big one. We do not know the failure modes or what it is bad at. We do not know the timeline for when or whether any version of these capabilities becomes publicly available, if at all. Maybe some of this gets released in a more constrained form. Maybe certain capabilities stay restricted permanently. We genuinely just do not know.

That is the nature of responsible disclosure in security work and it is appropriate given what this model can do.

The Bottom Line

Anthropic just positioned itself as something bigger than a chatbot company. They are building the security infrastructure of the internet and doing it with partners who wrote serious checks to be part of it.

A specific model. A specific coalition. A specific set of capabilities that are too powerful to release but too important to ignore.

If you think Opus and Sonnet are good now, it is just getting started. Anthropic just gave us a peek at how high the ceiling actually goes. And it is a lot higher than most people are ready for.

Sources:

Did you learn something good today as a developer?
Then show some love.
© Muhammad Usman
WordPress Developer | Website Strategist | SEO Specialist
Don’t forget to subscribe to Developer’s Journey to show your support.

The Standup Meeting Is Dead. AI Killed It.

Muhammad Usman — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:11:00 +0000

Every morning, thousands of developers stop what they are doing, join a call, and answer three questions.

What did you do yesterday?
What are you doing today?
Any blockers?

It made sense in 2005. It does not make sense in 2025.

We automated everything except the meeting that was easiest to automate.

AI Can Already Do Everything a Standup Was Designed to Do

Summarize your commits from yesterday
Generate a status update from your pull requests
Flag blockers based on stalled tickets and unresolved dependencies
Predict delays before they become emergencies
Notify the right people without interrupting everyone else

That is not the future. That is available right now with tools like LinearB, Waydev, Allstacks, and even custom GPT workflows connected to your project management tools.

So why are we still doing standups?

Habit. Comfort. The Illusion of Alignment.

Standups were never really about information sharing. They were about managers feeling informed and teams performing productivity. AI does not perform. It just reports.

And that is the uncomfortable truth most teams are not ready to face.

The Standup Is Not a Communication Tool. It Is a Trust Problem in Disguise.

When a team needs a daily meeting to know what everyone is working on, it means the system is not doing its job. The code, the tickets, the commits and the tools should tell that story automatically.

The best engineering teams are already moving this direction. Async updates. AI generated summaries. Meetings only when a human decision is actually needed.

Not because they are lazy. Because they understand that attention is the most expensive resource on any engineering team, and a 15 minute standup is never just 15 minutes when you factor in context switching.

So What Should Replace It?

A daily AI generated digest. Automated blocker detection. A short async voice note when something actually needs a human explanation. And a real meeting, maybe once a week, for decisions that genuinely require everyone in the room.

The Standup Had a Good Run.

But it was always a workaround for the lack of visibility in software teams.

AI just made that workaround unnecessary.

The question is not whether to kill the standup.
The question is why you are still defending it.

Did you learn something good today as a developer?
Then show some love.
© Muhammad Usman
WordPress Developer | Website Strategist | SEO Specialist
Don’t forget to subscribe to Developer’s Journey to show your support.

Strange but Shockingly Effective Coding Tips That Actually Work

Muhammad Usman — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:49:30 +0000

There are coding techniques that sound completely ridiculous but actually solve your problems faster than the “proper” methods you’ve been taught. These aren’t theory from textbooks. These are techniques developers actually use to get unstuck and write better code.

Your brain doesn’t work the way you think it does. When you’re stuck on a problem, pushing harder usually makes it worse.

These techniques work because they align with how your brain actually solves problems.

Let’s break down the ones that matter most.

Step Away From Your Screen

When you’re stuck on a problem for more than an hour, your brain is running the same mental loops repeatedly. It’s like being in a maze and repeating the same wrong turns. You won’t find the exit by running that path harder.

When you physically step away, your brain switches from focused mode to diffuse mode. Your subconscious takes over and starts making connections your conscious mind kept missing. This is why solutions often hit you in the shower, during walks, or right before sleep.

When you’ve been stuck for an hour, get up. Walk around. Use the bathroom. Get a snack. Your brain needs the reset more than your code needs your frustrated staring.

Sleep on Hard Problems

When you can’t solve something by end of day, close your laptop and stop thinking about it. Watch TV, play games, then sleep.

Your brain processes problems while you sleep. It reorganizes information and strengthens neural connections. You’re running background processes overnight. The bug that made no sense at 6 PM often becomes obvious at 9 AM.

Set a hard stop time for difficult problems. If you haven’t solved it by then, shut down and trust your brain will work on it overnight.

Rubber Duck Debugging

Keep a rubber duck on your desk. When you’re stuck, explain your code to the duck line by line, out loud.

“Okay, this function takes a user ID, then queries the database for the user’s data. Wait, I’m not checking if the user ID is null before querying. That’s the bug.”

When you’re just reading code in your head, your brain fills in gaps and makes assumptions. When you’re forced to explain it out loud, you have to articulate every single step. Those gaps become obvious.

It doesn’t have to be a duck. Use a cat, a coffee mug, or just talk to the empty air. The point is verbalizing your logic forces you to examine it instead of assuming you know what it does.

Write Ugly Code First, Refactor Later

When solving a problem for the first time, you don’t actually understand it yet. You think you do, but until you’ve made something work, you’re coding based on assumptions.

Write the ugliest, most brute-force version that works. No design patterns. No abstractions. Just get something working with the most straightforward solution.

That ugly first version teaches you where the real complexity is. It reveals which parts matter and which you were overthinking. Then you refactor with actual knowledge about the problem instead of guessing.

For example, if you need to process user data, don’t immediately build a flexible data processing pipeline with strategy patterns. Write a function with a for loop. Make it work. Then add flexibility if you actually need it. Usually you won’t.

Move Your Body Regularly

Exercise isn’t just good for health. It reduces stress hormones, increases blood flow to your brain, and triggers chemicals that improve focus and problem-solving.

Taking a walk isn’t wasting coding time, it’s creating better coding time.

Take a 15-minute walk every afternoon. When you’re stuck, walk around the block or do some pushups. Physical movement breaks mental blocks.

Box Breathing for Focus

Breathe in for four seconds. Hold for four. Breathe out for four. Hold for four. Do this three times.

When you’re frustrated with a bug, your body enters stress response mode. Your thinking gets narrow. Box breathing calms your nervous system and resets your focus. Try it next time you’re about to rage-quit.

Productivity Habits That Work

The Big 3 Rule

Before checking Slack or email, write down three tasks. The three most important things you need to accomplish today.

Example:

Fix the login timeout bug
Write tests for payment processor
Review Sarah’s pull request

Everything else is secondary. If you complete those three, you’ve won the day. This keeps you focused on what matters instead of getting lost in reactive work.

Do Your Hardest Task First

Do your most dreaded task first thing, before checking messages or doing easy tasks. That task sitting in the back of your mind creates background anxiety all day. Do it first and you’ve already won. Everything after feels easier.

Stop While You Know What’s Next

When taking a break or ending your day, stop while you know what needs to happen next. Leave a comment:

// TODO: next validate the user input and handle the null case

Restarting work is hard because you have to reload context. A clear breadcrumb lets you pick up immediately with no mental overhead.

Master Your Tools

Keyboard Shortcuts

Every time you reach for your mouse, ask: “Could I have done that with a keyboard shortcut?”

Your mouse is slow. The fastest developers navigate code entirely with keyboard shortcuts. Start with three shortcuts this week and actually use them. Next week, learn three more.

Key shortcuts to learn:

Jump to file by name
Jump to function definition
Search across all files
Multi-cursor editing
Move lines up/down

Use Command Line

The command line gives you power and automation. If your favorite GUI app dies, you start over. Command line tools stay consistent.

Learn to navigate directories, search files with grep, and chain commands together. One script that saves 10 minutes daily gives you 50+ hours back per year.

Debugging Techniques

Binary Search Your Bugs

When you have no idea where a bug is, drop a print statement halfway through your code. Check if the bug happened before or after. Keep halving the search space.

Each check eliminates half the possibilities. “Somewhere in 1000 lines” becomes “in these 30 lines” in just a few checks.

Use Print Statements

Senior developers recommend debuggers. They’re powerful. But for 90% of bugs, print statements are faster.

print("got here")
print(f"user_id is: {user_id}")  
print(f"about to call the API")

Simple, fast, works everywhere. No configuration needed.

Review Test Code First

When reviewing code changes, start with the tests. Tests show what the code should do and give you a mental model before diving into implementation. If tests are bad, the code probably is too.

Take Care of Your Brain

Real Breaks vs Fake Breaks

Real breaks mean getting away from your screen. Go outside, talk to someone, do something physical. Five genuine 5-minute breaks throughout your day beat eight hours straight.

The Distraction List

When a random thought interrupts your focus, don’t try to ignore it. Keep a text file called “distraction-list.txt” on your desktop. Write the thought down and go back to work.

Your brain just wanted to make sure you didn’t forget. Once it’s written, your brain lets it go.

Skip Coding on Burnout Days

Some days your brain isn’t there. You’re foggy and frustrated. Coding while burnt out creates bugs and technical debt you’ll fix later anyway.

Do code reviews instead. Update documentation. Plan features. Organize tasks. There’s always work that doesn’t require peak mental sharpness.

Working With Your Team

The Boy Scout Rule

Whenever you touch code, leave it slightly better than you found it. Fixing a bug? Improve variable names. Add a comment. Extract duplicated logic. These tiny improvements compound over time.

Keep Pull Requests Small

Big pull requests get rubber-stamped. Nobody reviews 500 lines properly. Small PRs get real feedback, catch bugs, and get meaningful suggestions.

If your feature needs 500 lines, break it into five PRs. The quality increase is worth the extra planning.

Ask for Specific Feedback

Don’t send PRs with just “please review.” Ask specific questions:

“Please review error handling in lines 45–60”
“I’m unsure about query performance in the new function”
“Does the test coverage make sense?”

Specific questions get specific answers.

Problem Solving Methods

Ask “Why” Five Times

Don’t just fix surface issues. Ask “why” five times to find the root cause.

“The server crashed.” Why? “Ran out of memory.” Why? “Cache grew too large.” Why? “Not clearing old entries.” Why? “No expiration logic.” Why? “Nobody thought about long-running instances.”

Now you know the real problem; implement cache expiration, not just add more memory.

Break Complex Problems Down

Stuck on something complex? Make it simpler until you can solve it.

Building a recommendation engine? Start with “show random items.” Then “show items from same category.” Then “show items other users liked.” Each small step teaches you something and is actually achievable.

Use Pseudocode First

Before writing real code, describe your logic in plain English:

// Get user from database
// If user doesn't exist, return error
// Check if user has permission
// If no permission, return error
// Process request
// Return success

This forces you to think through logic without syntax distractions.

Code Review Best Practices

Open PRs Early

Don’t wait until everything’s perfect. Open a draft PR at 30% completion.

“Hey team, here’s my approach. Thoughts before I finish?”

This catches problems early when changing direction is easy, not when you’re 100% done.

Give Feedback About Code, Not People

Bad: “You didn’t handle the error case.” Good: “This error case isn’t handled yet.”

Bad: “You’re overcomplicating this.” Good: “This could be simplified by using X.”

The code is the subject, not the person.

Mark Blocking vs Non-Blocking

Make it clear which comments are critical:

“Blocking: This will crash if input is null” “Nit: Consider renaming for clarity”

This helps prioritize what must be fixed versus what’s opinion.

The Weird Tricks

Rename Variables to Ridiculous Names

When you’ve stared at code so long your brain stops seeing it, rename variables to silly names.

Change userData to thisStupidUserThing. Change isValid to theDumbCheckThatHatesMe.

The absurdity breaks your mental pattern. Your brain has to actually read the code instead of assuming it knows what’s there.

Run the Same Code Again

Code fails. You don’t change anything. You run it again. Sometimes it works.

This isn’t always superstition. Environmental factors change. Race conditions happen. Network requests time out then succeed. External services hiccup.

Running again shows if it’s a consistent failure or intermittent issue. But on the third run without changes, start debugging.

Make Your Code Public

Put your code on GitHub publicly.

“But what if it’s bad?” That’s the point. When people can see your code, you naturally write better code. You add comments, clean up messy parts, think more carefully about naming.

External accountability creates internal standards.

Start Using These Now

You don’t need to try everything at once. Pick three techniques that sound like they’d solve problems you’re facing. Try them for one week. Actually commit to trying them properly.

Maybe you start with the Big 3 daily tasks, rubber duck debugging, and taking real breaks. Or writing ugly code first, keyboard shortcuts, and asking for specific feedback.

The combination doesn’t matter as much as actually trying new approaches.

The best developers aren’t the smartest. They’re the ones who understand how their brains work and create systems that work with their brain instead of fighting it.

These techniques aren’t magic shortcuts. They’re patterns that align with how problem-solving actually works. Your brain wants to wander when stuck, so let it wander productively.

Your brain fills in gaps when reading code, so force yourself to verbalize. Your brain works better after rest, so actually rest.

Some of this sounds ridiculous. Talk to rubber ducks. Take bathroom breaks. Rename variables to silly names. Write ugly code first.

But ridiculous doesn’t mean wrong. Try these techniques and see what happens. Worst case, you’ll have funny stories. Best case, you’ll get noticeably better at solving problems.

Now go fix that bug you’ve been stuck on.

Did you learn something good today as a developer?
Then show some love.
© Muhammad Usman
WordPress Developer | Website Strategist | SEO Specialist
Don’t forget to subscribe to Developer’s Journey to show your support.

The Frontend Skills That Are Actually Dying (Not the Ones You Think)

Muhammad Usman — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 03:05:44 +0000

Everyone is pointing fingers at jQuery and PHP. The real list is different, more uncomfortable, and way more relevant to your career right now.

Open any developer forum today, and someone is declaring something dead. jQuery is dead. PHP is dead. CSS is dead. Most of these takes are wrong, recycled, or both.

This article is not that.

Two developers. Same years of experience. One keeps getting interviews. The other keeps getting ghosted.

The difference is not talent. It is which skills they are still holding onto.

First, the skills everyone says are dying — but are not

jQuery runs on over 75% of all websites. W3Techs has tracked this for years, and the number barely moves.

WordPress powers 43% of the entire web. It runs on PHP.

These are not dying. Stop worrying about them.

The real list is different. And it hits closer to home.

#5 — Writing CSS purely from scratch

This was a real skill. Understanding the cascade, specificity, and layout modes. Developers spent years getting good at this.

But the workflow has changed.

Tailwind is now mainstream, not controversial. CSS Modules handle architecture. Design tokens handle values. AI handles most of the boilerplate.

A developer who only writes raw CSS with no exposure to any of these tools is becoming rare in job listings.

The skill still works. The workflow around it has moved on.

#4 — Cross-browser CSS hacks

If you learned frontend before 2016, you know this pain. Vendor prefixes. Conditional comments. IE-specific layout bugs. It was a real specialization.

Internet Explorer reached the end of life in June 2022.

All major browsers are now evergreen. They auto-update. The Interop initiative, a joint effort between Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla, has been closing compatibility gaps every year since 2021.

Tools like Browserslist and autoprefixer handle what is left automatically.

The hours spent debugging IE layout collapses are just gone as a category of work. That expertise does not have a job anymore.

#3 — Building UI components completely from scratch

Writing a modal from zero used to mean something. Focus trapping, ARIA attributes, keyboard navigation, and scroll locking. It was genuinely hard.

Now shadcn/ui, Radix UI, and Headless UI exist, and they solve this better than most developers would from scratch, including the accessibility parts.

At most modern teams, building a modal or date picker from zero without a base library needs a specific justification.

If your CV says “built custom UI components” with no context, it reads as a legacy signal now. Not a differentiator.

#2 — jQuery-specific patterns

Not jQuery itself. The specific patterns around it.

$.ajax(). Deferred chaining. Plugin architecture. The mental model of wrapping everything in the jQuery object.

The Fetch API replaced $.ajax() natively. querySelector replaced jQuery selectors. Event delegation works natively now.

A developer starting at a new company today is far more likely to walk into a React or Vue codebase than a jQuery-first one.

Knowing jQuery is fine. Listing it as a primary skill on a CV aimed at product companies is a different story.

#1 — Manual Webpack and Babel configuration

For years, knowing how to configure Webpack from scratch was genuinely marketable. Entry points, loaders, plugins, code splitting, and tree shaking. Senior frontend developers were expected to know this cold.

Then Vite arrived. And Create React App was officially deprecated.

Vite is now the default for new React, Vue, and Svelte projects. Its defaults handle what used to require hours of Webpack tuning.

Deep Webpack knowledge still matters if you are maintaining a large legacy codebase. But it is not something a developer starting out needs to prioritize.

That window has closed.

What replaced them

Skill fading away what replaced it?

Hand-rolled CSS Tailwind, design tokens, and AI-assisted styling.
Cross-browser hacks evergreen browsers.
Interop initiative: Custom components from zero shadcn/ui, Radix, Headless UI.
jQuery-specific patterns Fetch API, native DOM, modern JS, manual Webpack config Vite, Turbopack, zero-config defaults

Why this feels uncomfortable

These were not shortcuts. They were the right way to build things at the time.

The industry just does not retire skills with any announcement. One year a technique is standard. A few years later the job listings quietly stop mentioning it.

That is the nature of working this close to the browser. The platform keeps moving.

The only thing that matters

Frontend is not getting harder to enter.

But it is getting harder to stay relevant without paying attention.

The developers who are fine are not the ones chasing every new framework. They are the ones who notice when a category of work gets absorbed by tooling and adjust accordingly.

The skills that are dying are not the ones everyone argues about.

They are the ones that quietly stopped showing up in new projects while everyone was busy arguing about jQuery.

Did you learn something good today as a developer?
Then show some love.
© Muhammad Usman
WordPress Developer | Website Strategist | SEO Specialist
Don’t forget to subscribe to Developer’s Journey to show your support.

You Can Now Learn Anything 100x Faster With Claude.

Muhammad Usman — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 11:49:39 +0000

Most people use AI to draft emails or summarize articles.

And honestly, that is totally fine. There is nothing wrong with that.

While everyone is busy using Claude for the small stuff, they are completely missing the biggest benefit sitting right in front of them.

Claude can become your personal learning coach.

Not a chatbot. Not a search engine. A coach. One that designs your learning journey, tests you on what you know, breaks down the most complex ideas into something you can actually understand, and points you toward the best resources on the planet.

The difference between someone who learns fast and someone who stays stuck is not intelligence. It is not even time. It is having the right system. And these 6 prompts are that system.

1. Learn Anything in 20 Hours

Here is a truth most people do not want to hear. The first 20 hours of learning anything are the most important. That window takes you from completely clueless to genuinely capable. But most people waste those 20 hours on the wrong things, in the wrong order, with the wrong focus.

Claude fixes that immediately.

The Prompt:

“I want to learn [topic] in 20 hours. I am a complete beginner. Break this into a structured plan. Tell me what to focus on first, what to ignore, and what the biggest beginner mistakes are.”

What you get back is a roadmap. Not a vague one. A real, prioritized, beginner-aware plan that tells you exactly where to start and what to skip. That alone saves you days.

2. Create a One-Page Cheat Sheet

Your brain absorbs more than you give it credit for. The real problem is not retention. It is retrieval. When you are in the middle of applying something, you forget where you put the information and waste time digging through notes, tabs, and bookmarks.

A one-page cheat sheet solves that completely.

The Prompt:

“Create a one-page cheat sheet for [topic]. Include key concepts, frameworks, common mistakes, and a quick-reference section I can scan in 30 seconds.”

Print it. Pin it. Keep it open. You will reach for it more than you think.

3. Quiz Me Until I Break

Reading feels productive. It is not. Not really.

Sitting with a book and moving your eyes across words is one of the most passive things you can do as a learner. The research on this is not even close. Retrieval practice, meaning actually pulling information out of your memory by answering questions, beats re-reading every single time.

The problem is making good questions is genuinely hard work. Claude does it for you, and it does it well.

The Prompt:

“Quiz me on [topic]. Start easy, get harder as I answer correctly. If I get something wrong, explain why and ask a follow-up. Keep going until I answer 10 in a row correctly.”

This one prompt alone will expose every gap in your understanding that you did not even know existed.

4. Build a Learning Ladder

Most people give up on learning something new not because it is too hard, but because they climbed a wall instead of stairs.

They jump straight into advanced material before the basics are solid. Then it gets confusing. Then it gets frustrating. Then they quit and blame themselves when the real problem was just the order they tried to learn things in.

A learning ladder fixes the order.

The Prompt:

“Build me a learning ladder for [topic]. Start from zero, work up to advanced. Each rung should build on the one before it.”

Every concept you encounter from that point forward has a place to land. Nothing feels random anymore.

5. Find the Best Learning Resources

Not all resources are equal. That is not an opinion. That is just true.

Some books will change how you think forever. Most books are average at best. Some YouTube channels will save you months of confusion. Most will waste your afternoon. The problem is you do not know which is which until you have already invested the hours.

Claude has processed more information on more subjects than any single human being ever has. Use that.

The Prompt:

“What are the best resources for learning [topic]? Books, free courses, YouTube channels, podcasts. Tell me which to start with and why.”

The “why” part matters more than most people realize. It gives you context so you can match the resource to where you are right now, not just where you eventually want to be.

6. Use the Feynman Technique

Richard Feynman had one obsession his entire career. He believed that if you cannot explain something simply, you do not actually understand it yet. You just think you do.

This technique is uncomfortable. That is the point.

The Prompt:

“I am going to explain [topic] as if you are a 12-year-old. Interrupt me when something is unclear or uses unexplained jargon. When I finish, tell me what I got right, wrong, and what gaps remain.”

Then just start talking. Or typing. Whatever feels natural.

Claude will stop you the moment something does not hold up. It will point out the jargon you used without realizing it. It will find the gaps in your explanation that you glossed over. And when you are done, it will give you an honest, structured breakdown of exactly where your understanding is solid and where it is not.

That kind of feedback is what most people never get. Because most people are too polite to give it.

Claude is not.

And that is exactly what you need.

The Shift

The people who learn fastest are not smarter than everyone else. They just have better systems and better feedback.

For a long time, that kind of personalized coaching was expensive, rare, or both. You needed to know the right person, pay for the right tutor, or get lucky with the right mentor.

That is no longer the case.

Every single one of these prompts is free to try today. Right now. All it takes is opening Claude and treating it like what it actually is. Not a tool for small tasks. A partner for serious learning.

Pick one topic you have been putting off. Run it through all 6 prompts. See what happens.

You will not go back to learning the old way.

Did you learn something good today as a developer?
Then show some love.
© Muhammad Usman
WordPress Developer | Website Strategist | SEO Specialist
Don’t forget to subscribe to Developer’s Journey to show your support.

Please. I'm Begging You. Close The Tab.

Muhammad Usman — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 10:03:02 +0000

This is a submission for the DEV April Fools Challenge

What I Built

A website that doesn't want you there.

No content. No product. No reason to exist. Just a letter addressed directly to whoever was unfortunate enough to find it asking them, with increasing desperation, to please close the tab.

They don't close the tab.

Every visit makes it worse. The website begs, then journals, then hires a lawyer named Tab Closington, Esq. A data center technician named Dave gets involved. Dave ends up in his car. The fonts collapse into Comic Sans. The lights go out. A glow named Gerald appears.

By visit ten, the website has exhausted grief, legal threats, dark mode, and Comic Sans. So it throws a party instead, confetti deployed, dignity gone, and admits, quietly, at the bottom of the letter: I missed you. Don't tell anyone.

Ten visits. Ten escalating stages of a website having a complete emotional breakdown because you wouldn't leave.

Demo

Don't you dare click this link:

Code

The entire thing is a single index.html file. No frameworks, no dependencies, no build step. Drop it anywhere and it runs.

How I Built It

HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript — nothing else.

The visit counter lives in localStorage, so the escalation persists across refreshes and tab closes. Every time you land on the page, it remembers, and the letter gets worse.

Each of the ten stages has its own headline, body copy, distress bar, extra content block (journals, a legal document, an incident report), button labels, signature, ticker text, and browser tab title, which rotates between increasingly unhinged variations while you're on the page.

The SVG face animates through states: smile, flat, worried, crying (actual teardrops that elongate via attribute animation), dark mode, and party bounce. The distress bar fills with a different color depending on severity, green to amber to red. From visit six onward, the card physically shakes before reloading. From visit eight, the headline gets a chromatic aberration glitch effect. Visit ten fires, 130 confetti pieces, and turn the body background into a looping rainbow animation.

The writing does the heavy lifting, though. The whole thing only works if the voice feels like a real person having a real bad time, so every stage was written to escalate not just in chaos but in specificity. The eleven minutes spent picking the sad blue. Dave's exact quote. Gerald. The Comic Sans apology. The ending.

Prize Category

Community Favorite — because the joke only lands if someone shares it with a friend and makes them click it without context. That's the whole game. No setup, no explanation. Just: visit this. Keep visiting.

25 Trending Self-Hosted Projects on GitHub

Muhammad Usman — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 08:53:54 +0000

At some point, paying $12/month for a notes app that holds your grocery lists starts to feel absurd. Not because $12 is a lot of money, but because you are a developer. You know what a database is. You know what a Docker container is. And somewhere in the back of your head, you know there is a perfectly good open-source tool sitting on GitHub that does the same thing, runs on a $5 VPS, and does not require you to accept a new privacy policy every six months.

That is the self-hosting pitch, and in 2026 it has never been more convincing. The tooling is genuinely excellent now. Deployment is usually a compose file and ten minutes. And the community producing these projects is large, active, and moves fast.

Here are the 25 projects worth knowing about right now.