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 whitehouse.gov/aliens. Styled in the fashion of the X-files TV show, this is a web product created and published by the government. Paid for with your tax money and – given my experience working on various government projects – probably highly funded with delivery cycles that have lots of space for bureaucratic swings and roundabouts.

Watching the site, I was amused at first but soon the hair on my neck stood on end and I turned first speechless and then disgusted to my core.

This isn’t a playful site about outdated paranoid government materials about extraterrestrials, it is a live tracker of arrests of illegal immigrants portrayed like a Hollywood trailer painting the current president as the only one with the guts to rid our world of unwelcome beings living amongst us.

This is cynical, xenophobic and dehumanises a whole group of people. People, not extraterrestrial lifeforms. People with families, hopes, dreams and struggles they had to get through to be where they are now. People who are illegally where they are, yes. But instead of naming and punishing those who brought them there illegally or those who make them work without legal backup, this site gleefully celebrates when and how the victims of these illegal trades were detained. Whilst defining them as alien, not belonging and something dangerous and necessary to “remove”. People tracked and detained in a fashion that is highly debated and reminds more of government sanctioned Droogs rather than law officers just doing their job.

Let me repeat this, because it’s important: this is not some social media stunt by a YouTuber or Podcaster. This is not a xenophobic or racist subculture related private news site. This is a government funded, created and promoted product released on the most official of channels they have.

Someone designed this. Someone built this. Someone signed off the bills and the time sheets. And you paid for it. At no time during all this someone thought that this is not only beyond tasteless but also reminiscent of the darkest times in human history.

This is straight up from the totalitarian and fascist playbook: You dehumanise, you track, you detain and finally you exterminate. This should never happen again.

I grew up and now again live in Germany. During my upbringing, the horrors of the Nazi regime were still around to remember. I met victims and people “who just did their job”. I heard people say that not all was bad. I’ve encountered broken, guilt-ridden people who had no idea how to move on. School visits to concentration camps, Nazi interrogation sites and prisons were common. If you have not been to any of them, I really advise you to go. Another excellent place to keep the horrors on top of mind is the uprising museum in Warsaw, Poland.

Even on my daily walks there are reminders of what happened. On a road I walk along every day there are two gilded cobblestones that remind people that on 4.11.1942 Doctor Albert Martin Fröhlich and his wife Dora were taken from their homes and brought to the prison Theresienstadt. They were both killed in Auschwitz 1944.

Two doors down from my house is another one of those stones. This one reminds us of Hans Schulz, a member of the resistance who got detained on the 27.9.1944 and executed in a nearby prison on the 20.4.1945.

Now, these people weren’t illegal aliens. They were Jewish and the other one was a German man of courage. Their fate was sealed when the government at the time defined them as unwanted and illegal or enemies of the state. Most likely their whereabouts were reported to the authorities of the time by law-abiding, good people. And this is a really slippery slope that we seem to be on right now again. How illegal is too much? How different do you have to be to count as “alien”? Who defines this?

Nothing that happened in the Third Reich was illegal according to the laws at that time. Nothing seemed as horrible as it turned out to be at first. People were detained and put into prison. Many people claim not to know what happened in these prisons and expected the people put there to get a fair trial and be sent somewhere they can live. There were even propaganda stories that all Jewish people would be sent to live in Madagascar.

So it felt OK for people to see these police actions take place. After all, these people did something illegal or belonged to a group of people always up to no good. The government will take them away so they can’t be a danger to the law-abiding citizens any longer.

Would you have done something?

Whenever I went to a concentration camp or museum I wasn’t surprised by the horrors and cruelty. These have been a constant throughout history, we are damn inventive and creative at causing people misery and pain. I was more baffled by how people could have stood by and allowed it to happen. How could people be blind to what is really happening?

The reason came to me much later: fear. The first thing a totalitarian government leading to fascism does is to show ultimate strength and give the impression that nothing will go past them. Total control, observation and paying and promoting people to report others. All in the name of keeping “their people” secure. People trade freedom for protection. And realise far too late that their protectors are not benevolent supporters but thugs that enjoy punishing people. So it is easy to say that you would have done something, but the reality is that most people would be too scared as they saw what happens to people who disagree and stand up. Maybe you have a family and you are worried about what happens to them. Maybe you just felt powerless, as the propaganda of the regime keeps telling you that your job is to consent and applaud, in exchange for your freedom. You vs. them, and the government is the only one that can protect you from them.

That is why the alien web site is not a fun joke, but it is a worrying decline in tone and messaging. This started earlier when the ministry of defense was renamed to the department of war. There wasn’t any at the time that this country was directly involved in, so what does that mean?

In any case, we live in worrying and scary times. Not because of the amount of crime – that is actually on the decline – but in terms of what reality is sold to us by official government channels. And that happens all around the globe. The question is where we want to stand. Someone built this web site and thought it was a fun project with an important message to the world. I hope their pay check is worth it.

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 unordered list with labels and checkboxes and links inside the label.

<ul>
    <li><label>
        <input type="checkbox" name="edit" value="Cats">
        <a href="index.php?gallery=Cats">Cats</a>
    </label></li>
</ul>

Given the right CSS and some breathing space this works well with a mouse and keyboard. You can click next to the link to check the checkbox and on the link to navigate to the gallery. It also works using a keyboard. You can tab through the list and check/uncheck using the space bar. The following screencast shows what that looks like.

Now, it feels wrong though. I am mixing two interaction modes here, navigation and selection, one being link based and the other form based. I am wondering if that creates any issues for screenreader users. The other thing I am wondering about is if there is an issue with nesting all in the label as some older assistive technology didn’t like that. I can work around that using `for` and `ids`:

<ul>
    <li>
        <input id="CBDucks" type="checkbox" name="edit" value="Ducks">
        <label for="CBDucks">
            <a href="index.php?gallery=Ducks">Ducks</a>
        </label>
    </li>
</ul>

The question though is if that is still an accessibility issue and if it doesn’t make more sense to show the navigation as links and create a toggle to switch to the selection use case? What do you think?

You can try out the demo page for yourself here.

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 achieve the thing we really care about: solving problems. Every developer I know loves solving problems and when there aren’t any problems to solve, we invent them.

This is the reason why so many frameworks and libraries exist. We take a coding solution we built and make it generic so that it can deal with whatever problem that is thrown at it. And then we lose interest and start all over again.

Don’t get me wrong, writing code is great fun. Having witnessed and helped new languages and environments evolve and change from an OK concept to a platform almost every software solution relies on is also great. Squeezing the last bit of optimisation out of a script whilst keeping it understandable and maintainable is a great feeling. But the code is not the end goal. If we find a tool that does the job as well, we will use that.

Every great developer I know is open to change and eager to learn about new things to do and try out. Asking if the code is what defines us is a sign that people still do not take the role of programmer as a normal thing for humans to do. We’re not some freaks in the corner that nobody understands and that stand just outside of “normal” society.

We’re doing a job and we are honing our craft constantly and to find better ways to make computers help others simplify their lives. Creative people thrive doing the thing that makes them happy. Writers write although the web is 90% AI generated and algorithm optimised slop. Musicians play in their garage and then pubs with 10 people because they like making the music they do. Painters paint although a prompt could give you a seeminlgy perfect picture. People knit, sew and weave although there is already far too much fashion available to ever wear in a lifetime.

Developers use code as a tool to create. So when you ask me if I feel threatened by AI and agents I can safely say that I am not. These things can take the task and the typing and the releasing from me, but I still feel a lot of joy popping open the hood and looking at things the machines created knowing that I can read and understand it. I can take it apart and put it back together. I can make it do things that the machine didn’t think of. I can make it better. I can make it mine. And so can you.

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 data insights about the WeAreDevelopers World Congress speaker submissions, but things went very wrong and our bar charts exploded …

Now we call on all you coders, hackers and developers out there to help us recover the data we wanted to show.
Each bar of the chart has been rotated, moved to a different part of the screen and scaled.

We were able to analyse the location and other data though. For each bar chart you get the `x` and `y` screen coordinate where its bounding box starts, the angle of the `Rotation` in radians, the `scale` as a factor of 1 and the `width` and `height` in pixels.

All the data you need is in dataset.csv in the format of comma separated values.

Item,Group,x,y,Width,Height,Rotation,Scale
JavaScript,Languages,239.97,391.67,56.71,29.15,0.28,0.76
Python,Languages,401.44,353.55,59.43,43.76,0.54,0.77

Now, what we want you to use your coding skills for is to find the widths of the bars…

Can you tell us:

• What bar is the biggest?
• What bar is the smallest?
• What are the averages of each chart (Languages, Tools, Categories, AI topics)?

For example (no, not the real data):

Biggest item is JavaScript with 14
Smallest item is Cobol with 2
 
Averages:
- Languages: 30
- Tools: 23
- Categories: 78
- AI topics: 12

Do you have your results? Then why not apply as a Challenger for the CODE100 in July ?

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 my current job I’m running a 200k+ subscribers newsletter and a quite successful podcast. I had my own social presence since around 2004 with varying degrees of success. I really don’t care for the numbers and I never in earnest tried to make a living solely off my social presence. So I never tried “growth hacking” or took deliberate steps to reach millions. I use social media as a channel out, a scratchpad to note down ideas and experiments and invite other people to comment and together create better solutions, share information and joy. Social media to me always meant humans writing things as they wanted to tell the world about them.

Two things that gave me quite some reach over the years have never changed though: it’s important to post a lot and in a reliable cadence and it’s important to have a voice and take a stand, voice an opinion.

Whilst collecting tools to cover in our newsletter, I came across one service that annoys the hell out of me.

AI Social Media Writing Assistant for LinkedIn, Twitter & 6 More Platforms
Your AI reputation coach that learns your voice, reads your feeds, and tells you exactly where to show up, then writes comments and posts that sound like you, drawing from your real stories and experience.

Excellent, isn’t it? Instead of having to do all the reading, thinking or creating you point a machine to the things you did in the past and make it appear as you. And not just for posting, also for commenting and interacting with probably people but more likely other bots. We automate away the human or social part, trading it for growth and numbers.

The speed in which highly successful people publish huge treaties and books lately makes me understand that tools like that are pretty widespread and used. I do get about 10 emails a day offering AI tools that automate my job as developer relations leader.

The thing is that I don’t want that. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m part of a conversation and available for advice when I’m clearly not. I don’t want to publish for the sake of having published at a certain time or in a thread that causes lots of comments.

Social media has become a toxic rage bait machine with the companies that run it clearly being ok with this. I really would love people to call out more when others are obviously replaced by automation and to tell the platforms to bugger off when they ask you to create more content geared towards interaction rather than information.

I remember a long time ago foursquare was a social thing to do. You checked in at a place to show that you’re there and ready to interact with people and meet contacts.

I was at an event that time and bummed out as my flight to the office was early and I couldn’t attend the party with networking booths. So I told another speaker that this is a shame and his answer was to go past the venue on the way to the airport and check in on Foursquare so people thought you’ve been there and it was their fault for not finding you. I lost a ton of respect for that person on that day.

As an actor or author you don’t send your body or stunt double to attend interviews or sell autographs at comic con. Don’t create a virtual double that posts for you on social media when you can’t be arsed or feel overwhelmed. Take that overwhelming feeling and write about it, showing the world that your mental health is as fragile as the one of the people who follow you and read your work. Be human and only there when you can be there.