DevTerms: For Every Word You Quietly Googled

You know that moment in a standup when someone says a word, everyone nods, and you nod too, but inside you are quietly opening a new tab.

Yeah. I built something for that moment.

It is called DevTerms. One click, one term, one story. The words devs throw around without explaining, pulled up in seconds, written in plain English, with a real example so it actually sticks.

Why I built it

I was tired of pretending I knew what a word meant and Googling it 20 minutes later in private. And I was tired of dictionaries that read like they were written by a compiler. So I made the opposite of both.

How it is built (the part I had the most fun with)

1. Next.js 16 on Vercel, App Router, TypeScript
2. Google Sheets as the database, read through a Service Account
3. 7 day ISR cache so the Sheets API barely gets touched
4. On-demand revalidation endpoint for instant updates
5. Share-as-image export using the Canvas API, 1080x1080, ready for Slack or socials
6. SEO friendly per-term pages at /term/[slug] with Open Graph tags
7. Total monthly cost: $0

The whole thing runs on a spreadsheet I can edit from my phone. Add a row, hit refresh, it is live in production. No CMS, no database bill, no backend to babysit.

It is a small project. But small projects are how I think out loud, and this one is genuinely useful to me every week.

If you have ever silently Googled a word mid-meeting, you already know who this is for.

Try it: dev-terms.vercel.app.

And if there is a term you keep hearing and secretly hate, drop it in the comments. I will add it to the sheet tonight.