Christian Heilmann

Returning to the US: see you at All Things Open 2025

September 1st, 2025

When I still worked for a US company, I traveled every few weeks to the US, so much so that I had gold status on several airlines. Ever since the Covid pandemic hit and I got laid off by my last employer as part of a 10k employee cut, I stuck to Europe. Other reasons […]

A lesson from history for Software Engineers, Product Owners and CEOs

August 22nd, 2025

This is the U-1206. It was the peak of submarine technology at the end of the Second World War. Right now it lies at 70 metres depth slightly North West of England. You might say this is an impressive feat for a submarine to be submerged that long. Alas, it is isn’t by design but […]

Using GitHub Pages as a URL shortener / redirection service

August 11th, 2025

With the fate of Goo.gl in the balance and many URL shortening/redirection services being either expensive or spammy, I wondered if I could find a free/cheap way of achieving the same. So I got myself a short domain (CLXI.org) and looked at using a GitHub repo with pages to redirect URLs. Turns out, this is […]

Things not to do as a presenter if you want a great talk recording

August 5th, 2025

Currently I am editing >600 presentations of the WeAreDevelopers World Congress to release the videos at the end of the month. This is frustrating and painstaking work, as both presenters and moderators didn’t quite follow some simple ideas that make a talk a good recording. Conference organisers spend a lot of time and money on […]

Presentations should always work offline – especially in online conferences

July 14th, 2025

We just finished the WeAreDevelopers World Congress 2025 in Berlin, and I am still recovering from the event. It was a fantastic experience, and I am grateful to everyone who attended and made it a success. As the main moderator of the main stage, I had the pleasure of introducing many amazing speakers and topics. […]

Newsletter

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

160: Graphs and RAGs explained and VS Code extension hacks Graphs and RAG explained, how AI is reshaping UI and work, how to efficiently use Cursor, VS Code extensions security issues.
159: AI pipelines, 10x faster TypeScript, How to interview How to use LLMs to help you write code and how much electricity does that use? Is your API secure? 10x faster TypeScript thanks to Go!
158: 🕹️ Super Mario AI 🔑 API keys in LLMs 🤙🏾 Vibe Coding Why is AI playing Super Mario? How is hallucinating the least of our worries and what are rules for developing Safety Critical Code?
157: CUDA in Python, Gemini Code Assist and back-dooring LLMs We met with a CUDA expert from NVIDIA about the future of hardware, we look at how AI fails and how to play pong on 140 browser tabs.
156: Enterprise dead, all about Bluesky and React moves on! Learn about Bluesky as a platform, how to build a React App and how to speed up SQL. And play an impossible game in the browser.

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