I Built Mariutil: A Browser-Based Toolkit for Developers and Everyday Tasks
Over the years, I've used a lot of small online tools while developing software.
A JSON formatter here.
A Base64 encoder there.
A PDF converter when working with a document.
An image compressor when preparing an image.
A hash generator when debugging an API or configuration.
The tools already existed, but I kept opening different websites for simple tasks.
So I started building Mariutil.
Mariutil is a growing collection of browser-based tools for developers and everyday digital tasks.
The idea is simple:
Build useful tools that are fast, easy to use, and require as little friction as possible.
Why I started building it
I'm a software developer, and I regularly work with APIs, JSON, files, PDFs, images, authentication, and other developer workflows.
Many of the tasks I encounter don't require a large application.
Sometimes I just need to:
- Format some JSON
- Convert XML to JSON
- Encode or decode Base64
- Generate a hash
- Merge or split a PDF
- Extract text from a PDF
- Convert images
- Compress an image
- Generate a QR code
- Record the screen
- Convert audio to text
These are small problems, but they happen frequently.
That led me to the idea of building a single place for these utilities.
What I've built so far
Mariutil is still under development, but several tools are already live.
Developer tools
The developer-focused tools include:
- JSON Formatter
- XML → JSON
- JSON Mock Generator
- Base64 Encoder / Decoder
- Hash Generator
- Password Generator
These tools are particularly useful when working with APIs, configuration files, testing, and development tasks.
PDF tools
I've also been building a collection of PDF utilities:
- PDF Merge
- PDF Split
- PDF → Text
- PDF → JPG
- JPG → PDF
- PDF → CSV
- Word → PDF
The goal is to make common file operations available directly from a browser without requiring users to install desktop software for simple tasks.
Other tools
There are also tools for:
- QR code generation
- QR and barcode scanning
- Screen recording
- Audio transcription
- Image compression
- Image resizing
I'm continuing to add tools as I find useful problems to solve.
A focus on browser-based processing
One of the things I'm particularly interested in is doing as much processing as possible inside the browser.
For tools where browser processing is practical, the user's input can be processed locally instead of being uploaded to a backend server.
For example, this approach can be useful for:
- JSON processing
- Base64 encoding and decoding
- Hash generation
- Image processing
- Some PDF operations
- Some audio processing
The exact architecture depends on the tool.
The principle I'm trying to follow is:
If a task can be safely and efficiently performed in the browser, why send the data to a server?
This also makes the tools simple to deploy and reduces the amount of infrastructure required for many utilities.
Building each tool is its own engineering problem
At first, many of these tools seem very simple.
For example, an image compressor sounds like:
text
Image → Compress → Download
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