Developer Tools
Small utilities that would otherwise mean opening a REPL or trusting an unknown server with your data. Everything in this category processes input locally in the browser — nothing you paste or generate is uploaded, which matters when the input happens to be a token, a key or a customer record.
All developer tools
How these are grouped
- Generators
- Producing values: passwords, codes, identifiers.
- Encoding
- Converting between text and transport formats.
- Formatting
- Making structured data readable and valid.
Choosing the right tool
The Password Generator and QR Code Generator both produce something new from parameters you set; the JSON Formatter instead transforms something you already have. If the task is "make readable" or "check correctness" of existing structured data, that's formatting and validation, which are two different operations even though they're often asked for as one — see the guide below.
Common mistakes
- Assuming a pretty-printed JSON document is valid JSON — formatting only changes whitespace and doesn't check the grammar at all; a document can be perfectly indented and still fail to parse.
- Cropping the quiet zone (blank margin) around a QR code to fit a layout — it's part of the specification, not empty space, and removing it is one of the most common causes of an otherwise-correct code failing to scan.
- Choosing the lowest QR error-correction level to save space on a code that will be printed small, handled, or exposed to wear — the lower levels tolerate less physical damage before scanning fails.
- Generating a password that meets a site's minimum length but reusing it across accounts — length and uniqueness are two different protections, and rotating a single strong password everywhere provides neither.
A short example
A developer pastes an API response into a formatter, sees it re-indented cleanly, and assumes it's valid — then a separate system rejects it minutes later.
The formatter did its job (readability), not the validator's job (correctness) — a trailing comma or an unquoted key can survive formatting untouched and only surfaces when something actually parses the document against the JSON grammar.
Developer guides
- How QR Code Error Correction WorksA QR code can lose a real chunk of itself and still scan — here's the mechanism that makes that possible, and the trade-off it costs.
- JSON Formatting vs JSON ValidationPretty-printed JSON and valid JSON are two different claims — one is about how it looks, the other about whether it's correct.