Christian Heilmann

Checkboxes make excellent buttons

September 24th, 2020

Photo by TeroVesalainen I like checkboxes – they give me a simple way in a tool to turn modes on and off without using much space. I especially like it that you can style them with CSS without jumping through hoops like you need to with buttons. I like to use checkboxes as buttons. And […]

Tools should not only be for experts – they should turn us into them

September 15th, 2020

About eight years ago Bret Victor tried to change the way developer tools work by providing a faster and simpler way from creation to consumption. He also followed it up with a Learnable Programming Course asking for simpler development teaching courses. The presentation “Inventing on Principle” was a smash hit, despite its deplorable video quality. […]

A “right-click to show alt text” browser extension

September 3rd, 2020

A few days ago Amelia Bellamy-Royds asked on Twitter for a way to right-click any image and see its alternative text as a means to test web sites for accessibility problems. There are a lot of solutions already out there that do similar things. Accessibility Insights is one I keep using, but it feels like […]

Alt text overlay bookmarklet

August 27th, 2020

A few days ago my colleague Patrick Brosset tweeted that he has a fix for Chromium Devtools to allow for horizontal scrolling in the DOM view which sparked a response by Amelia Bellamy-Royds asking for a simpler way to display alternative text of images on the page. Now, there is already an improved way to […]

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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