Christian Heilmann

After rocking San Jose with our World Congress, WeAreDevelopers’ next port of call is Bengaluru in India. See you there on the 25th of November for two days of excellent talks and workshops !

Much like a lot of other people, I subscribe to quite a few of the newsletters of TLDR. As I re-use the things I found there in own publications, I did find the newsletters – ironically – not quite succinct enough to go through them quickly. I wanted to skip sponsored sections and other cruft, […]

When I got into machine learning it was all about making the world a better place. I worked for Microsoft and had access to projects and the smart people behind them that all were for the benefit of humans. Batch analysis of MRI scan data to allow doctors to detect cancer growths faster. Analysis of […]

WeAreDevelopers is coming to San Jose, California on the 23rd this month for the first time to run an event almost as big as the World Congress we did the last 10 years! – we now still need some people to moderate stages. Your job is to introduce speakers, run the Q&A and keep time. […]

On the 23rd of September we will come to San Jose to run the We Are Developers World Congress North America and I am dizzy with planning and excitement. 10k attendees, 600 speakers, tons of content. If you use WEAREDEVSDAY on checkout, you can now get half price tickets!

Translating documents isn’t hard these days, but when it comes to long documents, it still gets tricky as most translation services are limited to a few paragraphs and charge for larger texts. If you use Microsoft Edge, you can use the immersive reader mode to translate huge documents for free though. You can trigger the […]

[prompt: create a viral hero image that shows what I mean. Or, don’t] Currently I am on a half diet of social media as I am still locked out of X and by now I really don’t mind any more. Social media is dead and has been weaponised into a distraction, propaganda and rage discourse […]

In 1937, Karl Loewenstein, a German Lawyer published an essay in the American Political Science Review that can only be described as a blueprint for democracy to defend itself against fascism. You probably never heard of the essay entitled “Militant Democracy and Fundamental rights” and despite having a (highschool) degree in history, neither have I. […]

When adding an email link to a document you should use the mailto: URI scheme: Email Chris That makes the browser open the associated email tool instead of opening the link in the browser. Today I found out that browsers also offer a “copy email” in the context menu that only copies the email itself […]

Some time ago the US government announced that they will de-classify UFO sightings material from the 50s and 60s. This caused quite the stir amongst conspiracy theorists but also plain sci-fi fans like me. They did, and – of course – the results were not that insightful. A few days ago the government also released […]

I am currently writing a gallery script for myself and ran into an interesting accessibility question. I have a list of galleries with links to each of them. I also wanted to provide a checkbox to allow users to select several galleries and merge or download them. The HTML I use is the following. An […]

Lately I’ve been in a few podcasts and interviews and one question came up almost every time: What is left for developers to care about or define themselves with when all the code is written by AI? Here is the quick answer: being a developer was never about writing code. Code is a tool to […]

In July, I will run another live edition of CODE100 at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress and if you want to take part and earn your spot on stage in front of 5000 people, why not have a go at solving this year’s challenge? The char explosion problem Oh dear, we wanted to show you some […]

I was lucky enough to witness the beginnings of social media, working on the platforms that made it happen. I’ve also seen the decline of its first iterations and products. Currently I am witnessing the idea of a social web being perverted, weaponised and automated out of any trace of human or social aspect… In […]

I was on the We l❤️ Open Source podcast and talked about the threats to open source and software. Trading openness for convenience: From app stores to AI assistants

I liked social media. I love learning and showing people how things are done there. I’m a LinkedIn and Skillshare trainer and wrote a few books. I also published tons of information on various social media channels. I also like that creators get benefits from publishing information. A social media platform should reward great contributions […]

Did you know that you can host HTML/CSS/JS demos with execution and source code display on GitHub? All you need is a few include commands in a markdown file and your html/css/js files in a folder. Try it out here: https://codepo8.github.io/code-hosting-demo/example/ See the source here: https://codepo8.github.io/code-hosting-demo/example/index.md My Code Demo ## Try it out {% include_relative […]

After 20 years of using Twitter, I just lost access to my X account. The reason is that I fell for a phishing attack. As someone who helps a lot of people with their security issues, this is embarassing, but I want to make it a learning experience, so I will share my mistakes with […]

If you are following me there nothing that might be posted now is from me. DO NOT CLICK ANY links. I keep you posted when and if I got access again and will talk about it on the live show this coming Wednesday … This will be a good opportunity to re-assess my social media […]

WebMCP is an exciting W3C proposal that just landed in Chrome Canary to try out. The idea is that you can use some HTML attributes on a form or register JavaScript tool methods to give agents direct access to content. This gives us as content providers and web developers an active way to point agents […]

Quick segue here, but this story is too good. In 1942, Die Grosse Liebe came out, Goebbel’s Magnum Opus other than Triumph of the Will. The Nazi propaganda minister was really into this movie and wanted it to be a huge success swaying the emotions of the German people back to believe in winning the […]

In the 13th century Cistercian monks came up with a way to show the numbers from 1 to 9999 as a single character. The way it works is to add the lines of different characters to each other until the number is reached. So, if you want to show 161, you take the 1, the […]

Lately, I have found an incredibly annoying pattern in social media—especially LinkedIn posts: the “you are already behind” posts, claiming that by not using product $XYZ you have already been beaten by the competition. These incendiary headlines are often followed up by a testimonial that the author used $XYZ to deliver 10-23x the amount of […]

I’ve stated on several occasions that Lego made me a developer. I was the youngest of four kids who inherited a huge box of bricks with no instruction booklets. So I took lots of smaller bits to build bigger things and re-used skills and ways to connect things. I came up with my own models […]