Christian Heilmann

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 […]

The other day I found out that you can watch YouTube in Albania without ads. Personally I pay for YouTube and I think it is worth while, but I found that curious. Reasons might be that Google has no advertisement contracts in the country or it may just be too small a market to matter […]

In his excellent talk Get the Core Right and the Resilient Code Will Follow at Beyond Tellerrand in Berlin this year, Andy Bell showed how to sensibly discuss a coding issue amongst your team. He also did a more in-depth write-up on his blog. The problem that Andy described was having a CSS grid with […]

On January 6th, 1995 two bank robbers in Pittsburgh confused law enforcement by not making any attempts to conceal their faces but instead brazenly looking at security cameras as if they were invisible. The reason is that they actually thought they were. Clifton Earl Johnson had convinced his fellow in crime, McArthur Wheeler that covering […]

When people turn data into HTML tables using JavaScript, they either use the DOM methods (createElement() and the likes), but most of the time just append a huge string and use innerHTML, which always is a security concern. However, did you know that HTML tables also have an old, forgotten API ? Using this one, […]

Alright folks, the call for papers is open for two of the WeAreDevelopers events 2026, so if you want to speak at any of them, activate the following links and enter your details and the ones of your session(s): WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin , Germany 08-10/07/2026 WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose, […]