No-code
For apps built with Lovable, Replit, Bolt, v0 or Claude: getting them deployed, keeping data safe, and what the builder never set up.
63 posts · page 2 of 3
SQL for Beginners: The Queries You Need to Understand Your App's Data
You don't need to become a database expert to read your own data. The handful of SQL queries — SELECT, WHERE, ORDER BY, COUNT, JOIN — that let you answer real questions about your app, plus the two commands to be very careful with.
Social Preview Images: Make Your Links Look Good When Shared
When someone shares your app's link on Slack, X, LinkedIn, or iMessage, the preview card comes from Open Graph tags. What they are, the exact tags to add, the right image size, how to generate images per page in Next.js, how to test, and why your preview isn't updating.
SEO Basics for Your App: How to Get Found on Google
A beautiful app that search engines can't read is invisible. The fundamentals that matter for a small app or product site — titles and descriptions, crawlable pages, a sitemap, speed, and link previews — plus the single-page-app problem that hides many AI-built sites from Google.
How to Send Email From Your App Without Landing in Spam
Password resets, receipts, and sign-up confirmations that land in spam — or never arrive — are one of the most common launch-week problems. What SPF, DKIM, and DMARC actually do, how to set them up for your domain, and why your app should never send mail itself.
Why Does My App Look Broken on My Phone? Responsive Design Basics
It looks perfect on your laptop and falls apart on a phone: text too small, buttons off the edge, a page that scrolls sideways. What responsive design is, the five most common causes of broken mobile layouts, how to test properly, and what to ask your AI tool.
Replit Alternatives in 2026: What to Use Depending on Why You're Leaving
Replit bundles an AI agent, an editor, hosting, and a database. People leave for different reasons — cost, control, the agent, or outgrowing the platform — and each reason points to a different alternative. An honest guide to picking the right one.
How to Plan Your First App Before You Ask AI to Build It
Thirty minutes of planning saves days of AI going in circles. How to define the one problem your app solves, cut it down to a first version, describe your users' journeys and your data, and turn it all into a brief an AI tool can build from.
Open Source Licences Explained for People Building Apps
Your app is built on hundreds of open-source packages, each with a licence that says what you may do with it. What open source means, the difference between permissive licences like MIT and 'copyleft' ones like GPL and AGPL, and how to check your app isn't using something it shouldn't.
How to Move a Replit App to Your Own Hosting
Replit is a great place to build and a reasonable place to host — until the bill, the limits, or the lock-in start to matter. How to get your code and data out, where to put them, and the Replit-specific things that break on the way.
How to Launch Your First App: A Beginner's Launch Checklist
Your app works. Now what? A practical launch plan for first-time builders: the pre-launch checks, where to find your first users, how to launch on Product Hunt, Reddit, and Hacker News without getting ignored or banned, and what to watch in the first week.
How to Know When Your App Is Down (Before Your Users Tell You)
Most small apps find out about outages from an annoyed email. Three cheap layers — an uptime check, error tracking, and logs you can search — mean you hear first, and usually know why. What each one does, how to set it up in an afternoon, and how to avoid alerts you'll learn to ignore.
HTTP Status Codes Explained: 200, 301, 404, 500 and the Rest
Every response from a server starts with a three-digit number that says how it went. What the 2xx, 3xx, 4xx, and 5xx families mean, the dozen codes you'll actually meet, what each one tells you about where a bug lives, and which ones your own API should return.
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: What Each One Does
Every web page is built from three languages with three different jobs: HTML for structure, CSS for looks, JavaScript for behaviour. What each one is, how they fit together, what they look like, and how much of each you need to understand to steer an AI tool.
How to Read an Error Message (and Fix Things Faster)
Error messages look like walls of gibberish, but they usually tell you exactly what went wrong and where. How to find the one line that matters, what common errors actually mean, where to look when there's no error at all, and what to give an AI so it can fix it first time.
How to Write Good Prompts for AI Coding Tools
The difference between an AI tool that builds what you want and one that goes in circles is usually the prompt. A simple structure for asking — goal, context, constraints, and how you'll know it's done — with before-and-after examples you can copy.
How to Keep API Keys Out of an AI-Built App
AI-generated code hardcodes API keys all the time — and 'put it in an environment variable' isn't enough if the variable ends up in the browser. Which keys are safe to expose, which never are, and how to fix a key that's already leaked.
How to Hand Off an AI-Built App to a Client
Freelancers and agencies are shipping client apps faster than ever with AI. The handoff is where projects go wrong: accounts in the wrong name, no documentation, and an open-ended support expectation. A checklist for handing over cleanly — and keeping the relationship profitable.
Git and GitHub for Beginners: The Undo Button for Your Whole Project
If you build with AI, git is the single most useful thing you can learn — it lets you save your project at good moments and go back when the AI breaks something. What git and GitHub are, the six commands you need, and a simple routine to follow.
GDPR Basics for App Builders: What a Small App Actually Needs
If anyone in the EU or UK uses your app, GDPR probably applies. What personal data is, the principles in plain English, lawful bases, the rights users have (access, deletion), what to do about third-party services and data breaches, and a practical checklist for a small app. Not legal advice.
Frontend vs Backend: What's the Difference?
Every app has a part that runs in your browser and a part that runs on a server. Knowing which is which explains why secret keys leak, why some apps need a server and others don't, and what your AI tool actually built. A plain-English guide with a restaurant analogy that actually holds up.
Form Validation Explained: Client-Side, Server-Side, and Why You Need Both
Validation checks that what users type makes sense before you save it. The difference between browser-side and server-side validation, why only the server's counts for security, built-in HTML validation, sharing rules with a schema, and writing error messages people understand.
What Is an Environment Variable? .env Files Explained
Environment variables are how an app gets its settings and secrets — database passwords, API keys, the site's URL — without writing them into the code. What they are, how .env files work, why they must never reach GitHub, and the prefix that quietly makes a 'secret' public.
Does My App Need a Privacy Policy? A Plain-English Guide
If your app collects so much as an email address, the answer is almost certainly yes — and app stores, Google sign-in, and payment providers may require one anyway. What a privacy policy must cover, the other legal pages you'll need, cookie banners, and the practical obligations that come with them.
Dev, Staging, and Production Explained
Professional apps don't have one copy — they have several, so changes can be tried safely before real users see them. What development, staging, and production environments are, why they need separate databases and keys, and the simplest version that works for a small app.