I run a small tide times site and wanted to see the weather actually move, so I built this 3D weather map. Plain JS and WebGL, no three.js or map library.

The tides are calculated right in the fragment shader, so there are no tide frames to download.

It has nice sound effects too, turn them on when you try it.

Live: thetidechart.com/weather-map

Would like to know how dragging/zooming feels on your phone.

After struggling to land a job in 2024, when the market was pretty rough, I decided to take a different route and build something real. My goal was simple: either build something genuinely useful or gain more experience than anything else could offer.

Two years and around 90 hours a week later, VisuaLeaf is now listed in Microsoft's Azure DocumentDB documentation as a way to connect:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/documentdb/how-to-connect-visualeaf

It started as a MongoDB GUI, but I realized that everything I was building could apply to other databases too.

Nested objects and arrays should be easy to read in a table, not squashed into one cell... The same goes for JSONB. You shouldn't have to stare at an entire JSON object in a single cell. I made it so you can expand nested data one level at a time in both the tree view and table view.

I wanted everything in VisuaLeaf to feel as intuitive and straightforward as possible, from browsing data to performing more complex operations.

Today, VisuaLeaf supports MongoDB, Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, DuckDB, and 25+ more database engines.

What it does::

• Table + tree grid, built from scratch: This might not seem like much at first, but it actually took the most work to get right. The tree view can recursively expand thousands of rows simultaneously (near instant time), while the table view scrolls smoothly even with thousands of rows and columns. I ended up building my own AG Grid from scratch because libraries didn't support the nested column expansion I wanted. Getting both views optimized took about a year of work alone... but dang, was it worth it.
• Visual query builder: Build queries by clicking or dragging fields from the table and tree views. It generates readable SQL or MongoDB queries that you can copy and use.
• Data transfers with transformation: Move data between database engines (MySQL → Postgres, SQL → MongoDB), mask emails, phone numbers, and IDs along the way, or transform fields using custom JavaScript. You can also look up data from other tables, include it in your output, and apply transformations to those fields too.
• Compare and sync: Compare two tables or databases, including their structure and data, and synchronize them. For example, you can use this to keep staging and production databases in sync.
• Performance: Stress-tested with up to 1.6 GB of data, both tree and table views remain smooth even with large datasets. In my testing, VisuaLeaf also loaded data several seconds faster than other database tools I compared it against.
• AI / MCP: An integrated AI assistant and MCP support for interacting with databases through AI tools. (Wouldn't be an app in 2026 without it)
• ERDs, charts, dashboards, mock data, index management, query profilers, and a lot more than I can fit into one post...

There's a free version that covers what most people need day to day:

https://visualeaf.com

I'd really appreciate feedback! And happy to answer any questions!

Describble turns a sentence into a hand-drawn SVG avatar while you type: "tired pirate grandma, red beanie, round glasses" and the doodle redraws on every keystroke.

I wanted to see how far I could get with no framework and no AI, so here's how it's built:

- One static HTML page, vanilla JS, zero npm dependencies. The build is a single ~500-line Node script that concatenates the modules and inlines everything (121 KB gzipped, font included)

- Every keystroke replays the whole sentence through a rule-based parser, about 0.05 ms, so no debounce is needed

- The sketchy look: curves are split into tapered strokes, jittered with a seeded RNG, and "boil" between 4 frames at 9 fps (off with prefers-reduced-motion)

- The 2.5D head turn is just layer parallax: each SVG layer slides by its own depth

- Hash-based Content Security Policy: only the page's own inline script and style can run, and the only thing it can contact is an optional, documented counter of words it didn't understand

- English, Italian and Portuguese pages are prerendered at build time, and the gallery faces are rendered in Node through a tiny DOM stand-in, so search engines see real SVG files

It's rule-based, so it will miss words. Those misses are the most useful feedback I can get.

Site: https://describble.com

Code (MIT, drawings CC0): https://github.com/gasparegas/describble

Playable demo

Here is how it works under the hood:

• The Clay Aesthetic: To get that tactile stop-motion look, I used rounded boxes and applied low-frequency noise to the vertices. I baked a normal map from an actual sculpted clay ball, which dynamically scales based on the object size.
• Deformable Terrain: The clay you shape in-game is its own deformable mesh driven directly by your drag inputs.
• Mobile Optimizations: Getting heavy 3D to run on phones is tough. I rely on meshopt for models and run a fixed 1/120s physics step with interpolation. To save frame time, the shadow map only updates every other frame (saving about 14–26% of frame time).
• Progressive Loading: Asset size remains a challenge. I set up a later level's boss's models to load asynchronously only after play starts. For a fresh start of that chapter on a 9 Mbps connection, this dropped the initial load time. But I am still not quite where I would like to be.

How do you all handle the initial load payload for heavy 3D experiences on mobile? Would love to hear your optimization strategies!

For ages I've been using the website https://www.svgrepo.com/ as a great resource for free SVGs, but today when I visited, it gave me a fake Cloudflare verification that attempts to install some sort of malware on your computer, as you can see in the screenshots below.

It almost caught me, so I thought I'd put this out because I couldn't see any indication that anyone else had noticed this!

Fake cloudflare verification attempting to get you to run a malicious command in Run

Malicious run command