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.

Dev Digest 146: 🥱 React fatigue 📊 Query anything with SQL 🧠 AI News

Why it may not be needed to learn React, why Deepfake masks will be a big problem and your spirit animal in body fat! 

Dev Digest 147: Free Copilot! Panel: AI and devs! RTO is bad! Pi plays!

Free Copilot! Experts discuss what AI means for devs. Don't trust containers. Mandated RTO means brain drain. And Pi plays Pokemon!

Dev Digest 148: Behind the scenes of Dev Digest & end of the year reports.

In 50 editions of Dev Digest we gave you 2081 resources. Join us in looking back and learn about all the trends this year.

Dev Digest 149: Wordpress break, VW tracking leak, ChatGPT vs Google.

Slowly starting 2025 we look at ChatGPT vs Google, Copilot vs. Cursor and the state of AI crawlers to replace web search…

Dev Digest 150: Shifting manually to AI.

Manual coding is becoming less of a skill. How can we ensure the quality of generated code? Also, unpacking an APK can get you an AI model.

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