Christian Heilmann

Interaction bait is killing social media

July 11th, 2024

OK, I’m going to say it: interaction bait is killing social media. You know what I’m talking about. Those posts that are designed to get you to comment, like, or share. They’re everywhere, and they’re getting more and more annoying. I never cared much about timelines. Almost all my social media interaction is posting things, […]

Hot take: social platforms should disallow special character growth hacking

July 7th, 2024

Over the last few years something magical has happened without much fanfare: social media platforms and operating systems automatically translate text content for us. Having spent a lot of time traveling around conferences, I amassed a lot of people I follow who do not speak or write like me. And whilst it was fun following […]

Dev Digest 122 – Cracks in the polyfill

July 2nd, 2024

Hello and join me to learn about removing malicious code, what the web is up to and why there are some cool new careers in AI. News and articles First things first: if you use Polyfill.io delete it immediately from your server! The – by now pretty unnecessary library – has been acquired and is […]

Quick productivity tip: Renaming lots of files in MacOS Finder

June 24th, 2024

When you select several files in Finder and choose “rename” from the context menu, you can batch rename them. You can search and replace text, add to beginning or end or even generate numbered file names. Sadly, there’s no Regular Expressions support. Check the screencast to see it in action:

Witnessing the death of the web as a news medium

June 3rd, 2024

As some of you may know, I started out as a radio journalist. And when I discovered the web in around 1996, I knew that, to me, radio and TV were not the dominant news media any longer. Nowhere but on the web was it possible to research and cross-reference from dozens or resources with […]

Newsletter

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

Don't stop thinking, AI Slop vs. OSS Security, rolling your own S3 Despite AI you still need to think, Bitter lessons from building AI products,  AI Slop vs. OSS security and pointer pointer…
200: Building for the web, what's left after rm -rf & 🌊🐴 vs AI What remains after you do a rm -rf? Why do LLMs know about a seahorse emoji? What image formats should you use? How private is your car?
Word is Doomed, Flawed LLM benchmarks, hard sorting and CSS mistakes Spot LLM benchmark flaws, learn why sorting is hard, how to run Doom in Word and how to say "no" like a manager.
30 years of JS, Browser AI, how attackers use GenAI, whistling code Learn how to use AI in your browser and not on the cloud, why AI makes different mistakes than humans and go and whistle up some code!
197: Dunning-Kruger steroids, state of cloud security, puppies>beer

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