The Return of KB Cafe

For a stretch of the early 2000s, kbcafe.com was one of those bookmarks every working developer seemed to have. It ran practical how-tos on C++, C#, and COM, an early feed validator, RMail (RSS delivered to your inbox before that was normal), and one of the original RSS blogs. Then, like a lot of great independent dev sites, it went quiet.

We brought it back. Not as a museum piece, as a working developer’s knowledge base, the way it was meant to be used.

What’s here now

KB Cafe is one site with a few clear sections:

• Tools: fast, private developer utilities that run entirely in your browser. JSON → TypeScript, a JWT decoder, a cron generator, a Base64 encoder. Nothing is uploaded; paste freely.
• Reference: clear explainers on the fundamentals: OOP, concurrency, memory leaks, HTTP, SMTP, and more. Several are modern rewrites of the originals.
• Feeds: the RSS/Atom/OPML corner, honoring where this site came from.

What we kept, and what we didn’t

Restoring an old domain well means being honest about what aged well. The evergreen technical content, how Base64 works, how threads race, what a memory leak actually is, we rewrote for how we build today. The dated stuff, 2005 news about which feed reader just launched, we left in the past. Every old link still resolves to somewhere useful, but we didn’t resurrect a thousand stale posts just because they once existed.

Built fast, and private

One thing has changed for the better since the original. The tools here run entirely in your browser: paste a JSON blob, a token, a cron line, and it never leaves your machine. There’s no account, no telemetry, no “sign in to continue,” and the pages keep working offline once they’ve loaded. That wasn’t really practical in 2003; today it’s the right default for a developer utility, and it’s the one we picked.

Why bother with a 25-year-old domain?

Because the web rewards continuity, and good reference material doesn’t expire the way news does. The questions developers brought here two decades ago, how do I send mail in code, what’s the difference between these casts, why is my memory climbing, are the same questions today, asked by people who weren’t born when the first version shipped. That’s worth keeping a light on for.

Pull up a chair. The menu is open.

Related

Browse the Reference, try the tools, or read more on the blog.