Christian Heilmann

You are already behind by not having read this post.

January 2nd, 2026

Lately, I have found an incredibly annoying pattern in social media—especially LinkedIn posts: the “you are already behind” posts, claiming that by not using product $XYZ you have already been beaten by the competition. These incendiary headlines are often followed up by a testimonial that the author used $XYZ to deliver 10-23x the amount of […]

Building my faux lego advent calendar feels like current software development

December 26th, 2025

I’ve stated on several occasions that Lego made me a developer. I was the youngest of four kids who inherited a huge box of bricks with no instruction booklets. So I took lots of smaller bits to build bigger things and re-used skills and ways to connect things. I came up with my own models […]

Ad Blockers helped kill the open web

December 17th, 2025

The other day I found out that you can watch YouTube in Albania without ads. Personally I pay for YouTube and I think it is worth while, but I found that curious. Reasons might be that Google has no advertisement contracts in the country or it may just be too small a market to matter […]

Shuffling a CSS grid using custom properties

November 24th, 2025

In his excellent talk Get the Core Right and the Resilient Code Will Follow at Beyond Tellerrand in Berlin this year, Andy Bell showed how to sensibly discuss a coding issue amongst your team. He also did a more in-depth write-up on his blog. The problem that Andy described was having a CSS grid with […]

AI is Dunning-Kruger as a service

October 30th, 2025

On January 6th, 1995 two bank robbers in Pittsburgh confused law enforcement by not making any attempts to conceal their faces but instead brazenly looking at security cameras as if they were invisible. The reason is that they actually thought they were. Clifton Earl Johnson had convinced his fellow in crime, McArthur Wheeler that covering […]

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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