The blog just picked up a new section: Dev Tools — a set of free developer utilities that run entirely in your browser. You’ll find the link in the top navigation on every page.
Where these came from
These tools started life as a standalone site called UtilPlex. It worked fine, but it never got much traffic on its own domain, and half the reason I built it was to have these utilities one click away when I need them. So instead of letting them sit in a corner of the internet nobody visits, I folded them into RoboDodd, restyled everything to match the site, and gave every tool page a sidebar so you can hop between tools without bouncing back to the index.
What’s included
Formatters — beautify or minify code with proper syntax highlighting:
- JSON Formatter & Minifier — validate, beautify, or minify, with line and column error hints
- SQL Formatter — Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, SQLite, BigQuery, Oracle, and more
- CSS and SCSS formatters
- JavaScript and TypeScript formatters, powered by Prettier
- HTML & XML Formatter
Converters
- JSON to YAML and YAML to JSON, with optional key-case transformation (camelCase, snake_case, kebab-case, or PascalCase)
Encoding
- Base64 Encoder & Decoder with full UTF-8 support
Generators
- GUID / UUID Generator — batches of v4 UUIDs with uppercase, hyphen, brace, and quoting options
- Lorem Ipsum Generator — words, sentences, or paragraphs
Text & diff
- String Measure & Counter — characters, words, sentences, lines, bytes, and a per-character breakdown
- Text & File Diff Checker — side-by-side line diff of two pieces of text
Time
- Time Zone Converter — DST-aware conversions and a world clock
Nothing you paste leaves your browser
Every tool is a static HTML page plus one small JavaScript bundle. When you format a JSON blob or diff two files, all of the work happens locally in your browser tab — there is no server component, no upload, and no request that carries your data. That matters when the thing you need to format is a config file, a query, or anything else you’d rather not paste into a random website.
How it’s built
Same philosophy as the rest of this site: static HTML rendered at build time, no framework runtime shipped to the client. Each tool is a small ES module bundled with esbuild, the editors are CodeMirror 6, and the heavy lifting is done by the same libraries you’d use in a build pipeline — Prettier for JavaScript and TypeScript, sql-formatter for SQL, js-yaml for the converters, and js-beautify for HTML and CSS. Every page gets syntax highlighting, Ctrl/Cmd+Enter to run, copy buttons, and light/dark themes that follow the site’s toggle.
If there’s a utility you wish was in the list, ping me on X or GitHub — the setup makes adding a new tool pretty painless.