Yesterday was the final of Eurovision. Lots of people use this as an opportunity to post pictures of dead babies. I get it, we live in pretty rough times. But the ESC is not an official European vote, or political platform. So how about we concentrate on the real elections going on. We have enough borderline fascist parties in every country to worry about. We should probably educate their fans about the dangers they pose.

Nobody asked me to give my statements. But, I watched the whole thing. So, here is my review of all the entries from winner to last place. It’s from a pure musical, performance, and ESC spirit perspective.

You can see all the votes and videos here

Switzerland – The Code – Nemo

This was a well deserved win. Sure, some folk can shout pandering to wokeness and gender fluidity, but I don’t care. Nemo had an amazing presence, it was a pitch-perfect rendition and felt like part of a musical. Singing this high and still showing that much power is not an easy feat. Seeing Nemo getting the votes from the expert jury was lovely, I thought they’d pass out any second. Shame the trophy got smashed in the final performance though. 5/5

Croatia – Rim Tim Tagi Dim – Baby Lasagna

This was for sure a banger and fun song, but I really missed a strong vocal lead. Given that he is a sound engineer, there is a lot of wall of sound, but no singer that takes me with him. Still, lots of stuff to shout in any stage of drunkenness, so that got them the audience vote. 4/5

Ukraine – Teresa & Maria – alyona alyona & Jerry Heil

Strong performance and pretty great song. When they told us that one is a rapper and the other a classical singer, I totally opted for the wrong ones. Sure, a bit of pathos in this one, but it deserved a really good place. 4/5

France – Mon amour – Slimane

France sent in a real heavy hitter. Slimane won every local award he could and sold gazillion times platinum. And it was a great performance – he knows his stuff. Well deserved high up place. 4/5

Israel – Hurricane – Eden Golan

Of course, lots of drama around this one and quite a few re-writes before they were allowed to release the song. ESC allows no political content, so that was a big one. All in all, this song did not deserve to end up this high, it was predictable and something we’ve seen dozens of times. 2/5

Ireland – Doomsday Blue – Bambie Thug

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. And nobody expected an exorcism, witchcraft and lots of screaming from Ireland. All that mixed with surprisingly melodic sequences. This was a tour de force, and pretty impressive, but I was wondering what the chap was on stage for. I’d have expected more of a duet. It was something different, so much for sure. And given that it will rattle the cage of some religious fanatics, more power to them. 4/5

Italy – La noia – Angelina Mango

We thought this could be a winner. Angelina Mango, daughter of a locally famous pop singer, delivered to a T what you expected. It focused on her and the song and the show was backdrop. I liked it and it is very hummable indeed. The topic of the song being boredom of Gen Z is interesting to look into further. 5/5

Armenia – Jako – Ladaniva

Well, that looked like a fairground or medieval festival with lots of people having fun. All in all it felt disconnected or trying too hard. But you have to give them credit for representing their culture in their song instead of going for a middle of the road pop song. 3/5

Sweden – Unforgettable – Marcus & Martinus

The irony award of the event goes to Sweden for calling this unforgettable. As it was the most forgettable boy-band-ish drivel. The stage show was pretty much the lights-inside-a-salad-shredder Puff Daddy style we all came to be utterly sick of. 1/5

Portugal – Grito – Iolanda

This was pretty avant-garde and a complex song. Ioalanda knows how to sing, but for the ECS there was no repeatability and dance floor compatibility. Shame, this was a damn good song. 4/5

Greece – Zari – Marina Satti

This started as a TikTok video (portrait style with flowing hearts) and continued to be a pandering to that new form of entertainment. Props for using lots of local instruments and music styles, but this had more influencer written over it than performance. It was fun, though and Marina Satti obviously had a blast. 3/5

Germany – Always on the Run – Isaak

Isaak came from the streets, literally as a busker. And this was a damn powerful performance. Vibes of Shakira, but he surely has a voice to be remembered. He also looks likeable and with no ego. When he won the German selection he said he needed to go to the bathroom as he is about to shit himself. Lovely to see someone get that far and win more points for his country than the last 4 years combined. As swearing isn’t allowed, he had to remove a “shit” in the lyrics but kept up with it seamlessly. 5/5

Luxembourg – Fighter – Tali

Luxembourg is back after a long hiatus and tried hard to be a performer people like. Sung mostly in French with English parts this was nothing to remember. Seen it a lot, solid work, but I missed something to grab me. 2/5

Lithuania – Luktelk – Silvester Belt

Again, run-of-the-mill performance. Cool that they sung in their own language though. 2/5

Cyprus – Liar – Silia Kapsis

Christina Aguilera was fun. This looked and sounded just a bit too close for comfort like her. Silia was the youngest performer, raised in Australia with Greek and Cypriot parents. So, what I missed here was country representation. Solid performance, again. 3/5

Latvia – Hollow – Dons

I felt for that chap. Damn good singer, sung his heart out, no performance around him, just some lovely particle animations and this bald headed man, by trade a voice actor, doing a great job. The song, however, failed to grip the audience and make people clap. 4/5

Serbia – Ramonda – Teya Dora

There was a lady on a rock who held the microphone far away and sang something. Vibes of Kate Bush failed to show up and it felt like a musical interlude when the rest of the stage was set up. 1/5

United Kingdom – Dizzy – Olly Alexander

This was an OK song, but the gay soft porn show made it hard to follow. This felt like it tried very hard to be edgy, including fancy camera trickery, but I was more confused than interested. It was a tad harsh to see though that they got zero points in the audience vote. Brexit means something, I guess? Still, the song was a toe tapper. 2/5

Finland – No Rules! – Windows95man

I had a good chuckle at that when I saw it on YouTube and I still love the silliness of this song. In the best tradition of Leningrad Cowboys, this was just having a blast and doing something, well, different. There was no way this would win, but just seeing him in his tiny tiny pants doing his tippy dance with fire whips was worth it. When you saw them getting the votes you realised they had a great time, regardless of outcome. 5/5

(It is interesting to ponder if the runner-up in the local votes would have done better, as Käärijä x Erika Vikman – Ruoska is a true banger!)

Estonia – (nendest) narkootikumidest ei tea me (küll) midagi – 5miinust & Puuluup

Winner of the longest song title ever in the ESC was a lot of older men on stage pretending to play a horse-hair harp and all singing differently in Estonian. It was entertaining, but also just confusing. 2/5

Georgia – Firefighter – Nutsa Buzaladze

My brother is a firefighter and looks nothing like that. Pretty obvious hot lady belting fair, that one, with dancers around writhing and stuff. Well, I suppose that’s considered working and what people want. Alas… 2/5

Spain – Zorra – Nebulossa

Zorra means bitch in Spanish and should not be said to a lady. Swearing is forbidden, so the audience had to sing the refrain. This had lads in corsets and kinky boots dancing around an older lady. The sound was perfect for Majorca/Ibiza tourists 6 Sangria in and bored the hell out of me. 1/5

Slovenia – Veronika – Raiven

Raiven tried to represent her country already two times and failed. This time she sang faux-nude in the middle of a group of scantily clad folk and it looked like Madonna trying to re-live glory days. Raiven is a good singer though and there were bits that could have amounted to something. 2/5

Austria – We Will Rave​ – Kaleen

No, you won’t. Even dropping some E would have made this a skit from a Helene Fischer show with less oomph. 1/5

Norway – Ulveham – Gåte

This was a damn great performance, sung in Norwegian with lots of old and new instruments and one hell of a presence by the singer. They won a lot of local Norwegian prices, and could easily rock a Mera Luna or Wave Gothic Festival with this song. This was baffling to me. It was a killer song. 5/5

Friday I released Issue 115 of the WeAreDevelopers Dev Digest Newsletter

This time you learn how AI changes how code is taught, cryptography, the history of passwords, how the internet is declining and you can play Super Mario on a type writer.

News and Articles

Some cool new things to try out: The Netlify Image CDN is a new player in cloud image conversion and offers similar functionality to imgix and Cloudinary. TypeScript 5.5 Beta is out. jsDelivr wasn’t available on the 2nd and they released an outage postmortem explaining what went wrong. I had no idea that Figma was written in a bespoke language called Skew and they wrote how they moved away from it to TypeScript.

If you want to spend some more time, here are some longer thought pieces, for example, learning about cache coherence, about the UX patterns of successful AI, and a full Cryptography Course in glorious 1990s website design. Talking of internet of yore, it seems the internet is in decline but we can still have a different web if we show it some love.

Interesting bits about language and AI: Scientific studies have been caught using ChatGPT because of excessive use of words like ‘commendable’ and ‘meticulous’ and AI Copilots shift teaching away from syntax to emphasizing higher-level skills in code.

Last but not least, here’s an illustrated history of passwords and there is a coffee shop where you need to order via SSH at terminal.shop.

Code and Tools

Weird code things…

You probably have used JSON.stringify() in the past, but did you know it has two optional parameters? The first one is a replacer, a function that is called on each value to convert it or an array to filter the output. The second is a spacer, defining the character that will be added to each line. If the spacer is a number, it adds spaces, if its a string, this one is added.

Let’s look at some JavaScript things. First is that with `using`, JavaScript is getting new, disposable APIs. Learn about the top 5 underutilised JavaScript features, when to use bun Instead of Node.js, Jo Franchetti has an intro to TSConfig for JavaScript Developers, James Kerr explains how the Array.sort(comparator) works and here is a cheat sheet for moving from jQuery to vanilla JavaScript.

On the platform side, Google has an alternative proposal for CSS masonry as a counter to Webkit’s proposal. Niels Leenheer talks about the brief history of the User-Agent string, Jake Archibald explains the difference of HTML attributes and DOM properties and there is a Virtual x86 simulator in WASM that allows you run all kind of operating systems in the browser.

In the tools space, tinyworldmap is an offline-first world map to use in your applications and the OSS Gallery features the best open-source projects.

Work and Jobs

GitHub has 5 tips to supercharge your career, Microsoft ties executive pay to security after failures and breaches, 7 things engineers should know about talking to users might make your job easier and it’s important to remember that perfectionism can stall you. On the “wow” side, many startups fell for a fake accelerator scam

Procrastination Corner / Wonderful Weird Web

• Tolkien’s Middle-Earth wasn’t a place. It was a time in (English) history
• A playable Super Mario Level recreated on a typewriter.
• Moodist gives you ambient sounds for focus and calm

The next edition of CODE100 is in Manchester in the UK and I am super excited to come back to the isle! It will be my first time in Manchester and as a huge Joy Division/New Order fan, I really look forward to it.

CODE100 is not your typical coding competition; it’s a coding game show where talented developers go head-to-head live on stage. It’s high energy and people in the audience and on stage alike can participate.

• Attendees find a fun night watching coders compete in real-time, participate in audience challenges, win prizes, and network with the local tech community.
• Contestants can showcase their coding skills, compete against other talented coders, and potentially win a seat at the finals at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2024.
• Teams and organisations can nominate a challenger, engage with like-minded individuals, and showcase their group’s talent to a wide audience.

CODE100 is language agnostic, all you need as a challenger is analytic thinking skills, a Github login, a phone and nerves.

• Secure your ticket as an attendee here
• Apply as a CODE100 Challenger here

Me, I am the person coming up with all the challenges, pick the challengers and making sure all works smoothly. So, see you on the 22nd?

A themed CODE100 Challenge

As a themed challenge, here is our take on the classic Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division cover . In this challenge we ask you to return the amount of black or transparent pixels in the image and return it as an integer. You get the pixel data as a JSON object.

I will be in London for Devoxx earlier in May, back in Islington where I lived for 16 years, so hopefully I will see some of you there.

I just released a new CODE100 challenge- can you tell how many of these hearts are brown from a list of brown colours and the HTML source?

README and code
Gist

Codepen

See the Pen

#BuntStattBraun CODE100 challenge by Christian Heilmann (@codepo8)
on CodePen.

Next week’s solution will also have a “making of”.

Welcome to another edition of the WeAreDevelopers Dev Digest. This time we have am interview with Sead Ahmetovic, CEO of of WeAreDevelopers amd Scott Chacon, co-Founder of GitHub. They talk about careers, early coding days, developer communities, evangelizing git, and how AI is shaping the future of coding.

Gitting things done…

So, let’s get started with some some Git topics. Julia Evans is full of great information about it, for example talking about popular Git config options, or a deep-dive explanation on how HEAD works in Git. Always worth coming back to her blog.

Version control to me is the main step to move from an enthusiast to a professional developer. You need to get your head around it at first, but it is so much better than keeping lots of zip archives and rename folders to `_final_really_this_time_it_is_version1.0a` and the like. The big thing about Git is that it allows safe collaboration without the danger of overwriting each other’s work. And that makes us more effective.

Which is an interesting topic, as the median active developer merges 2 PRs per week and on average 48% of active developers are responsible for 80% of PRs merged since 2023. So whilst collaboration is much easier, we still wait for each other to deliver the work for us. Anyone wanting to start as a developer should try to break this cycle and start collaborating immediately. Do your own branch or fork and nobody can be annoyed at your contributions.

Working together is a big thing in general and it’s amazing how the communication part is often what breaks down. This is why many big products have a well-defined code of conduct. The W3C just adopted a new Code of Conduct which is pretty thorough and sensible to enforce. Also a good example for others.

Looking back at development learnings…

Development is nothing new, and we should be more organised by now and not afraid of change like other markets are. We have lots of experience of other people to build upon. And most is available on the internet. 50 years ago the book `The Mythical Man Month` defined the The “10x engineer and it still a mythical being to me. It’s not about one person doing everything or finding the shortcut to release things much quicker. It is about people from various backgrounds, with different perspectives and experience building things together. Lars Wirzenius wrote a wonderful article on his experiences of 40 years of programming. If performance is your thing, there is a great performance-aware programming series with lots of information about the inner workings of different processors.

But can’t AI do what we do already?

Last week, we reported about Cognition’s Devin, the first “AI software engineer” apparently making developers a virtual thing. Many people wrote about and over on the pragmatic engineer they discuss if the “AI developer” is a threat to jobs – or a marketing stunt. The previous Director of AI @ Tesla, Andrej Karpathy, wonders if software engineering can even be automated and XX explains how AI Will affect your career.

So, yes, AI can do a lot of things well, but it’s not really a replacement. And we still have to worry about it multiplying and replicating our biases. Mozilla did some research showing that AI is unfairly targeting and discriminating against Black people and whilst AI chats try their best not to give bad advice, you can get harmful responses from 5 major AI chatbots by using ASCII art of all things.
¯\_(ツ_/¯ indeed.

What about jobs?

The job market has become a bit better but job cuts are still at highest since dot-com crash which has people worried. I remember the crash and how the dotcom I worked for closed all its offices. My response was to work for an agency focussed on government services in the UK, which was a good time to lay low for a year.

However, whilst some development work will be automated, there are still high-paying jobs in the age of AI.

On a more baffling note, in some companies remote workers can’t get promotions. This sounds borderline discrimation to me, and I wonder what European work law says about this.

Back to the Bard?

Some things are great to be automated, like browser testing, and Playwright is an excellent tool for that. Browsercat released the Ultimate Guide to Visual Testing with Playwright and I did not know that Playwright has a code generator. You can use a web product, record all the interactions and let Playwright replay them.

Money matters

Serverless Horrors Stories”:https://serverlesshorrors.com/ is a collection of things going wrong when you go serverless. Especially bills coming in for traffic you didn’t expect. Another interesting thing is a report showing that most subscription-based apps do not make money and ads don’t seem to work either. So what can we do?

Tools in brief

• tlm – an offline AI Copilot, suggesting and explaining command line code, powered by CodeLLaMa.
• Capo.js helps you fix performance issues by optimising the `` order
• A Guide to Node.js Worker Threads to get you started
• Syntax Highlighting can be hard to do. One solution is Shiki.

Procrastination Corner

• Bartosz Ciechanowski is great at explaining complex topics with beautiful animated illustrations. He told us some time ago how bikes work, but this time things really take off with How planes fly.
• GifCities The GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine allows you to find all those wonderful GIFs that made people’s Geocities pages so much more unique. Time to let babies dance, hamsters spin and show that “under construction” sign.

That’s it! See you all next week!