Deeb Dive – Issue #1
Quick picks for indie devs.
👋 Hello World – and welcome to the very first issue of Deeb Dive!
This is your weekly dispatch exploring personal dev projects, indie tools, weird libraries, and the creative chaos behind building something just for yourself — or your dream that might scale to millions.
Let’s dive in. 🌊
Tool of the Week: Fira Code
Fira Code is a free, monospaced font designed specifically for developers. What sets it apart? It supports programming ligatures—those fancy combined symbols like =>, !=, and === that render as clean, beautiful glyphs.
But Fira Code isn’t just about looking cool. It’s about improving readability, reducing cognitive load, and making it just a little easier to parse complex logic at a glance.
It works out of the box in most modern editors (VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Vim, etc.), and it’s actively maintained with thoughtful defaults and performance in mind.
What You Can Use It For
- Making your code more readable and easier on the eyes
- Spotting logic patterns faster with ligatures like
=>,<=,===,!=, and more - Developer tools and IDEs that need clear, readable code
- Terminal apps and CLIs with complex command outputs
- Code editors for teaching, tutorials, or live coding demos
- Documentation sites and technical blogs showcasing code snippets
Package Spotlight – Sidequest.js
Sidequest.js is a tiny JavaScript library that makes background tasks feel first-class. You can queue up “side quests” to run in parallel to your app’s main logic—think retries, webhooks, cron-like jobs, and API calls—without diving into full-blown infra.
🛠 What You Can Build With It
- Webhook delivery with retries: Trigger webhooks after user actions and let Sidequest handle delivery + exponential backoff.
- Fire-and-forget API calls: Kick off tasks like sending emails or updating third-party services without blocking the main request.
- Scheduled jobs without cron: Queue background tasks to run after a delay or at intervals—right from your app code.
- Internal automations: Use it for bots, monitoring, or back-office logic that needs async tasks without new infra.
Built with Deeb – Flowlet
A sleek CLI tool to save, run, and sync your most-used shell commands and variables — all backed by Deeb.
Flowlet helps developers reduce friction by organizing repeat tasks into named commands, injecting variables, and syncing workflows between local and cloud environments.
What It Does
- Save & run shell commands with variable injection
- Sync your commands to the cloud
- Extract vars from command output
- Group commands by project
- Push/pull commands to/from a Deeb server
If you’re juggling APIs, cloud scripts, or recurring setups, Flowlet keeps your terminal life tidy — and fast.
Dive Deeper
This week, explore the inner workings of building an ACID-compliant database from scratch with Deeb. Learn how simple JSON files, Rust’s type safety, and clever transaction handling can create a reliable local database without all the usual complexity.
Perfect if you want to understand what really happens behind the scenes when data integrity matters — especially for personal or small-scale apps.
One Last Thing
If you liked this issue, forward it to a friend who’s hacking on their own stack.
And if you’re building something weird or wonderful — submit it here to get featured.
Thanks for diving deep,
— Nick