Christian Heilmann

Nobody should be a “content creator”

March 12th, 2025

As part of my job, I have to keep up with the social media space and I’m worried, bored and annoyed in equal measures. There is not much social about it any longer. Instead it’s become a race to the bottom of lowest common denominator content. And interaction bait. Or rage bait. Or just obvious […]

Building a “shoutout” component in plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript

February 26th, 2025

Every Wednesday I host WeAreDevelopers Live on YouTube. Afterwards we cut out short videos to post on social media. What we needed was an obvious “shoutout moment” in the recording to indicate an interesting quote or when we moved on to the next topic – much like a clapper in classic movies to sync audio […]

How to trim a video in MacOS using Finder!

February 20th, 2025

Context menus are a treasure trove of features you miss otherwise. Did you know for example that you can trim videos in MacOS Finder? All you need to do is open the context menu on any video file, go to “Quick Actions” and select “Trim”: You then get a trimming interface that allows to drag […]

Derpify.js is now on npm and GitHub – a tool for these trying times…

January 27th, 2025

As the times we live in demand it, I released Derpify.js. It is an npm package (3 line method) that turns strings into strings that are randomly mixed upper and lower case. console.log(derpify(’All he wanted to say was I love you all.’))console.log(derpify('All he wanted to say was I love you all.')) gives you: ALL hE […]

80 years ago

January 27th, 2025

80 years ago today the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated. Millions of people were killed there. Jews, Roma and Sinti, people with disabilities, homosexuals, political prisoners… All accounted for. Killed by people “just following orders”. An industrial destruction complex void of any emotion. A dehumanisation machine. Surrounded by villages of people who claim not to […]

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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