Overview
Dev Utility Hub started as a bookmark folder.
Like most developers, I kept a loose collection of browser tabs for the things I reached for constantly — a JSON formatter here, a Base64 decoder there, something to diff two blocks of text. They were scattered across random sites, half of them ad-heavy, some requiring sign-ups, none of them mine. Eventually I got annoyed enough to just build the thing myself.
The goal was simple: one place, no distractions, tools that actually work the way I want them to.
What’s inside
Universal Formatter — paste in JSON or XML and it’ll prettify, minify, or validate it. Useful when you’re staring at a one-liner API response and need to make sense of it fast.
Encoder / Decoder — Base64, URL encoding, and HTML entities, all in one place. Encode and decode in either direction.
Text Tools — a grab-bag of transformations I use regularly: case conversion, trimming whitespace, sorting lines, deduplicating, reversing. The kind of things you’d normally reach for a regex or a quick script to do.
Diff Checker — side-by-side text comparison with line-level highlighting. Good for spotting what changed between two config files, two API responses, two anything.
Timestamp Converter — convert Unix timestamps to human-readable dates and back, in both seconds and milliseconds. I check this more often than I’d like to admit.
How it’s built
All the actual processing logic lives in an ASP.NET Core Web API. The frontend is React — intentionally thin, just sending input and displaying output. There’s no business logic in the UI.
The backend follows a strict layered architecture: Controllers handle routing, Services orchestrate, and the Core layer holds pure algorithm implementations with no external dependencies. This made unit testing straightforward — the Core is just C# functions that take input and return output.
The UI has a terminal-inspired design system with dark and light modes. It felt right for a developer tool.
What’s next
More tools as I run into more annoyances. A regex tester, a color converter, and a cron expression builder are on the shortlist.