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.

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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