Christian Heilmann

Releasing code in large corporations is slow – and there is a good reason for it

January 31st, 2023

One of the things I always loved about the web is its immediacy. You write a piece of code, publish it somewhere and people can access it. No compilation step, no packaging and distribution, no listing on marketplaces or app stores – just a push of the button. This gives people a wrong impression that […]

Things to do and not to do during a wave of tech layoffs

January 24th, 2023

Currently we are in a huge round of tech layoffs that are reminiscent of the first .com crash in the beginning of the century. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and now Google announced layoffs in the 10k range and it seems no one is spared. New people as well as people who have been at companies for […]

Web resilience is about users – not a shortcut for developers

January 18th, 2023

The web has replaced and outlived a lot of closed technologies because of its resilience. Its underlying technologies are simple and sturdy and one of its main design principles is to – no matter what happens – never punish the user for developer mistakes. User needs come before the needs of web page authors, which […]

Getting all the video thumbnails from a YouTube video

January 11th, 2023

I just wrote myself a small tool to get all the thumbnail images available for a YouTube video. Say you have a Youtube URL, the ID is the last part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDukVqBDd3Q, in this case “GDukVqBDd3Q”. Just copy this into the tool and you will get all the images available. You can choose to get JPG […]

ChatGPT will not replace programmers, but Search Engines should be worried

December 23rd, 2022

Unless you’ve lived under a rock, you probably heard of ChatGPT, OpenAI wunderkind chat bot that seemingly gives answers to any problem you throw at it. Of course people fed it with lots of programming questions and it yielded great results. This, once again, sparked a big discussion if “AI” could replace developers. I don’t […]

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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