Web development rarely gets difficult because of one huge problem.
More often, it's dozens of tiny problems.
You need to format a JSON response.
Convert a cURL command into Fetch.
Generate a UUID.
Test a regular expression.
Inspect a JWT.
Create a CSP header.
Generate an SRI hash.
Build an .htaccess rule.
Check a DNS record.
Convert something into another format.
None of these tasks are particularly difficult.
The annoying part is having to stop what you're doing, open another tab, find the right tool, paste something into it, figure out whether you trust it, copy the result, and then go back to your project.
I got tired of doing that.
So I started building small browser-based utilities for the problems I kept running into.
That project eventually became WebDevWorker.
The problem wasn't a lack of tools
There are already thousands of developer tools on the internet.
That wasn't the problem.
The problem was fragmentation.
One website would have a JSON formatter.
Another would generate hashes.
Another would test regex.
Another would convert cURL commands.
Another would generate CSS.
And after a while, my browser looked like a collection of bookmarks for tiny development tasks.
I wanted something simpler.
Open one place.
Find the tool.
Do the task.
Copy the result.
Get back to coding.
That became the basic idea behind WebDevWorker.
I wanted the tools to feel like utilities, not websites
One of the first design decisions was to keep the individual tools focused.
A developer shouldn't need a tutorial before using a JSON formatter.
If I paste JSON into a formatter, I expect to immediately understand what happened.
If I enter a value into a generator, I want the result to be obvious.
If there is an error, I want the error to tell me what needs fixing.
This sounds simple, but small developer tools can become surprisingly complicated when too many features are added.
So I kept coming back to one question:
Does this feature help someone finish the task faster?
If the answer was no, it probably didn't belong there.
Why browser-side processing matters
Another thing I cared about was privacy.
Developers regularly work with data that shouldn't casually be uploaded to random websites.
That could be configuration data, API responses, tokens, JSON documents, project snippets, test values, or internal information.
Not every piece of data is secret, but you shouldn't have to upload everything just to perform a simple transformation.
That's why many of the utilities are designed around client-side processing where practical.
The basic idea is straightforward:
Your browser can perform a surprising amount of useful work without sending the input to a server.
For example, a simple transformation can often happen entirely inside JavaScript:
const result = JSON.stringify(
JSON.parse(input),
null,
2
);
The browser parses the input, formats it, and displays the result.
There is no reason for a simple operation like that to require a backend service.
Of course, client-side processing isn't automatically a guarantee of privacy for every tool. Developers still need to understand what a particular application does with data, and some operations may require external services.
But when server-side processing isn't necessary, avoiding it can be a useful design choice.
Small tools can solve surprisingly big interruptions
Consider something as basic as converting cURL to Fetch.
Nobody wants to manually translate a complicated request when they already have a working cURL command.
Or think about generating an SRI hash.
The actual cryptographic operation isn't necessarily difficult.
The interruption is what makes it annoying.
You stop coding.
Search for a tool.
Open it.
Paste something.
Maybe deal with ads or unnecessary UI.
Copy the output.
Return to the project.
Do this ten times during a workday and the interruptions start adding up.
That is the kind of friction I wanted to remove.
Building a collection instead of one giant tool
As more ideas came up, I could have built one enormous developer application with hundreds of settings and menus.
I decided against that.
Instead, the platform became a collection of focused utilities.
Some are for frontend development.
Some are for JavaScript and TypeScript.
Some are related to APIs.
Some are for security.
Some are useful for SEO and webmasters.
Others are simply small conversion or generation utilities.
The result is a growing toolkit covering many of those little tasks developers encounter during normal work.
The technical challenge wasn't just writing JavaScript
Writing a small browser utility is usually the easy part.
Making dozens of them feel like one product is harder.
Once you have many tools, consistency becomes important.
The interface needs to feel familiar.
Buttons should behave predictably.
Inputs and outputs should follow similar patterns.
Errors shouldn't look completely different from one tool to another.
Copy actions should work the way users expect.
Navigation needs to make sense.
And the whole thing needs to remain fast.
That meant thinking about the shared parts of the application rather than treating every page as a completely separate project.
Reusable JavaScript, shared CSS patterns, common UI behavior, responsive layouts, and consistent interactions became just as important as the individual calculations.
Performance changes how you think about a tool
A developer utility doesn't need to be a huge application.
In many cases, the actual computation is tiny.
That makes performance a design opportunity.
If a tool only needs HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to perform its job, there is a strong argument for keeping the architecture simple.
Less infrastructure can mean fewer things that can break.
It can also make deployment easier and reduce unnecessary dependencies.
I'm not saying every application should be static.
Complex products obviously need databases, authentication, APIs, background jobs, and other infrastructure.
But a tool that performs a small calculation or transformation doesn't necessarily need all of that.
Sometimes simple is the better engineering decision.
53 tools later
The collection eventually grew into 53+ developer and webmaster utilities.
That number isn't really the point.
The interesting part is how each tool started.
Most came from a tiny moment of friction.
Something like:
"I need this right now."
Then:
"Why do I have to search for a website every time I do this?"
And eventually:
"I should just build it."
That mindset is surprisingly useful for developers.
Instead of always thinking about the next massive SaaS product, sometimes it's worth paying attention to the small annoyances in your own workflow.
Those annoyances can reveal useful products.
What I learned from building it
The biggest lesson wasn't a particular JavaScript technique.
It was learning to respect small problems.
A five-second task isn't necessarily a problem.
But a five-second task repeated fifty times is.
And the cost isn't only the five seconds.
There is context switching.
There is searching.
There is deciding which website to trust.
There is copying and pasting.
There is remembering where you found the tool last time.
There is the mental interruption of leaving your development environment.
Good developer tooling reduces that friction.
Sometimes the best tool isn't the most sophisticated one.
It's the one that gets out of your way.
Where WebDevWorker is today
I built WebDevWorker as a place where developers, designers, and webmasters can find these small utilities without having to hunt through dozens of different websites.
You can explore the toolkit here:
The project is still evolving.
There are more utilities I'd like to build, existing ones I'd like to improve, and plenty of ideas that started as "this would be useful."
That's probably the fun part of building developer tools.
There is always another tiny problem waiting to be solved.
If you're building something yourself
If you're a developer and you've been thinking about building your own tool, don't automatically start with the biggest idea you can imagine.
Look at your own workflow.
What do you repeatedly search for?
What do you keep bookmarked?
What do you copy into temporary scripts?
What tiny task interrupts you every day?
Build that.
Make it useful.
Make it fast.
Make the interface obvious.
Then see what happens.
That's essentially how WebDevWorker started.
Not with a giant product roadmap.
Just with a collection of small problems that I wanted to stop solving the hard way.
Top comments (1)
Your "does this feature help someone finish the task" filter is a good one. I build small single page tools next to my main product, and they bring in far more search traffic than my blog posts ever did, mostly because each one does exactly what someone typed into Google.
Keeping it in the browser matters more than it sounds for anything with a token in it too.