Christian Heilmann

“modern” is rubbish

January 21st, 2025

Some terms irk me whenever I read them and one of them is “modern”. I try to avoid it like the plague, which is counter to all the marketing announcements you read out there: “Product X uses modern JavaScript features” “7 modern CSS tricks you can’t live without” “The modern productivity tool to get your […]

Learning HTML is the best investment I ever did

January 15th, 2025

One of the running jokes and/or discussion I am sick and tired of is people belittling HTML. Yes, HTML is not a programming language. No, HTML should not just be a compilation target. Learning HTML is a solid investment and not hard to do. I am not alone in this, Wired had a piece on […]

trimMiddle() – the missing String trim method

January 3rd, 2025

One of the cool features of MacOS’ Finder app is that it does not trim file names that don’t fit the space at the end, but in the middle of the file name. This does make a lot more sense, as it also shows what format the file is. Neither JavaScript nor CSS have a […]

A Twitter eulogy and the complicated relationship with my X…

December 26th, 2024

X isn’t Twitter. X isn’t even driven by human emotions any longer and is run by a management that doesn’t care about people, emotions or the dangers of propaganda. That’s why a lot of people who made Twitter grow in the beginning – real content creators – now meet on BlueSky. I do, too, but […]

Stupid interview questions will get you limited developers – is that what the market wants?

December 23rd, 2024

In recent times a meme has been making the rounds that allegedly shows a smart way to solve interview puzzles. In these memes developers are asked to create an ASCII pattern like the following: XXXXXXX XX   XX X X X X X  X  X X X X X XX   XX XXXXXXX The solution they come up with is a simple console.log() or print command. console.log(`XXXXXXX […]

Newsletter

Check out the Dev Digest Newsletter I write every week for WeAreDevelopers.

Dev Digest 146: 🥱 React fatigue 📊 Query anything with SQL 🧠 AI News

Why it may not be needed to learn React, why Deepfake masks will be a big problem and your spirit animal in body fat! 

Dev Digest 147: Free Copilot! Panel: AI and devs! RTO is bad! Pi plays!

Free Copilot! Experts discuss what AI means for devs. Don't trust containers. Mandated RTO means brain drain. And Pi plays Pokemon!

Dev Digest 148: Behind the scenes of Dev Digest & end of the year reports.

In 50 editions of Dev Digest we gave you 2081 resources. Join us in looking back and learn about all the trends this year.

Dev Digest 149: Wordpress break, VW tracking leak, ChatGPT vs Google.

Slowly starting 2025 we look at ChatGPT vs Google, Copilot vs. Cursor and the state of AI crawlers to replace web search…

Dev Digest 150: Shifting manually to AI.

Manual coding is becoming less of a skill. How can we ensure the quality of generated code? Also, unpacking an APK can get you an AI model.

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