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ExternalSoftware Engineering
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Building a Freelance Rate Calculator for Mexico with Plain HTML and JavaScript

Freelancers in Mexico often start with a tempting formula: take the monthly income they want, divide it by the number of hours they expect to work, and publish that number as an hourly rate. The result is usually too low because it treats every working hour as billable and ignores operating costs, time off, and uncertainty. This article shows how I built a small, privacy-first freelance rate calculator in plain HTML and JavaScript. It makes the assumptions visible without an account, upload, fra

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ExternalSoftware Engineering
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I built a chat where every word costs money — on TON, solo, no legal entity

Hi! I'm a mobile developer (Kotlin by day), and a couple of weeks ago I started a side project with a simple, slightly audacious idea: a chat where sending a message costs money — and the recipient gets paid. You write "hi", you pay. Someone writes to you, you earn. This is the story of how "what if attention literally had a price" became a working Telegram Mini App with real on-chain transactions — and the rakes I stepped on along the way, from app store rules to the anatomy of TON gas. An LLM

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ExternalSoftware Engineering
DEV Community

‘I Just Feel Ripped Off’: A Week of Users Asking What They Pay For

There is a particular kind of complaint that gets louder as a market matures. Not “this is broken” — that is the noise of a new product — but “wait, what am I actually paying for?” That is the sound of customers who have done the sum. This week, across the AI tools people pay for daily, that is the sound that carried. None of it is a single scandal. It is a mood: ads turning up inside plans that used to be clean, “unlimited” offers with a quiet expiry date, top-tier subscriptions that somehow fe

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ExternalSoftware Engineering
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Build a small OpenOSRS plugin in Java

A small plugin is a good way to learn a desktop client's extension system. This example displays a chat message after login. It covers discovery, dependency injection, game events and packaging without automating gameplay. I maintain the OpenOSRS project at OOSRS/OOSRS. It builds on the RuneLite/OpenOSRS ecosystem; the example below comes from our public example-plugin repository. You need Git and JDK 11. The repository includes its Gradle wrapper, so you do not need a separate Gradle installati

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ExternalSoftware Engineering
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I built an hourly newspaper for e-ink (and turned the pipeline into an MCP server)

Every hour, a Lambda pulls about 120 items from ~100 RSS feeds, asks a small model to act as an editor, and typesets the result as a 480x800 one-bit page for the Xteink X4 e-ink reader on my desk. The same pipeline now produces a multi-page "Morning Paper" PDF for reMarkable and Kindle, a TRMNL plugin, and an MCP server that agents can call. This is what it does, what broke, and what I learned about "news for agents". Everything below is live at https://briefing-service.wholemind.workers.dev. Co

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