💻 Developer Tools

These are the small utilities that interrupt real work: an API response that arrives as one unreadable line, a regex that needs checking against sample input, a JWT whose expiry you want to read, a cron expression you half remember the field order for. Each is a two-minute task that becomes a ten-minute detour when you have to write a script for it.

Why a browser tool rather than the terminal

For a one-off inspection, a browser tab is usually faster than assembling a jq incantation or opening a REPL, and it gives you immediate visual feedback — highlighted regex matches, a formatted tree, a decoded payload. For anything repeatable, the terminal wins, because it can be scripted and version-controlled. Use these for exploration and debugging, and move to code once you are doing it more than once.

The distinctions that cause real bugs

Encoding is not encryption. Base64, URL encoding and HTML entities are all reversible by anyone, with no key involved. None of them protects anything, and a JWT payload is readable by whoever holds the token.

Decoding is not verifying. Reading a JWT's claims tells you what it asserts, not whether the assertion is genuine. That needs the signature checked against the issuer's key.

Hashes are not password storage. SHA-256 is designed to be fast, which is exactly wrong for passwords — speed is what lets an attacker try billions of guesses per second. Passwords need a deliberately slow, salted algorithm such as Argon2id.

Formatting is for humans, minification is for machines

Keep the readable version as your source of truth in version control and minify as a build step. Minification is effectively one-way: comments are gone and the original formatting cannot be meaningfully recovered.