I just released a new CODE100 challenge- can you tell how many of these hearts are brown from a list of brown colours and the HTML source? README and code Gist Codepen See the Pen #BuntStattBraun CODE100 challenge by Christian Heilmann (@codepo8) on CodePen. Next week’s solution will also have a “making of ..read more

Welcome to another edition of the WeAreDevelopers Dev Digest. This time we have am interview with Sead Ahmetovic, CEO of of WeAreDevelopers amd Scott Chacon, co-Founder of GitHub. They talk about careers, early coding days, developer communities, evangelizing git, and how AI is shaping the future of coding. Gitting things done… So, let’s get started with some some Git topics. Julia Evans is full of great information about it, for example talking about popular Git config options, or a deep-dive explanation on how HEAD works in Git. Always worth coming back to her blog. Version control to me i ..read more

VS Code now has port forwarding. If you want to share what you are working on with the world, open folder in terminal, run your server and forward the port. Set it to public and Bob’s your uncle! This is great for some testing and showing people what you do, but of course should not be used as a hosting alternative. After all, you do make your computer web accessible that way, and you got to be 100% sure your app is safe ..read more

Last Friday, I released the 107th edition of WeAreDevelopers DevDigest. It celebrated the 35th birthday of the World Wide Web, we had a video of me interviewing the founders of Daytona about going open source, we covered the news around Devin, the first AI software engineer and went to space in a Yugo. All strapped in? Let’s go. Daytona goes open source Daytona is now open source and has been trending on GitHub for a few days. But what is it? We talked to CEO Ivan Burazin and CTO Vedran Jukic. Check it out. Happy 35th birthay, World Wide Web! Ah, 35 years of World Wide Web. I remember when i ..read more

ChatGPT announced that it now has a killer new feature: it can read out results in several synthesised voices. This means you can speak your prompt and the computer answers. We’ve reached Star Trek TNG levels of human-computer interaction. All praise be AI and the large corporations that make it happen! Except, when I read the announcement, my immediate reaction was “so what?”. Generated voices have been a thing since the 80s and I remember SAM / Reciter being fun for, well, hours at most. Check it in all its glory in this JavaScript port or on YouTube. MacOS even has generated voices in the ..read more

Apple wants to disallow Web Apps on iOS to be added to the home screen, run full screen and use the APIs necessary to create a great app. And to make things worse, only in Europe. We need to stop this from happening. The European Union is enforcing its Digital Markets Act and Apple aren’t happy about it. This should have been a great thing – more browser choice on iOS and distribution via URL. But instead it means you can’t publish full feature Web Apps on iOS – you stay within the browser and it’s limits. The Open Web Advocacy group has all the details what that means for developers, but, eve ..read more

Today, 21/02/2024, I will be opening a live event called Developer Program Leaders: Main Challenges in Developer Relations. Here’s the writeup of what I will be covering in 10 minutes: What is Developer Advocacy? According to the The Developer Advocacy Handbook written in 2009, here’s what a Developer Evangelist/Advocate does: A developer evangelist is a spokesperson, mediator and translator between a company and its technical staff. Every day millions of dollars are wasted in companies because non-tech people and tech people either don’t communicate at all or completely miss each other’s poin ..read more

Lately I have a person who pings me daily asking how many lines of code I have written today. The first time was on the weekend. My answer was “none, as weekends I concentrate on not doing computer things with my partner” which is an excellent idea. However, lines of code are often seen as productivity or even quality of a developer. And that’s nonsense. When Elon Musk took over Twitter he asked people to print out (!) the code they’ve done in the last few days to prove their worth. This lead to a lot of ridicule, and well deserved. This isn’t the 60ies. When pressure rises in companies you o ..read more

As CODE100 is coming to Amsterdam, we needed an archive of all the code puzzles we had so far. As the challenges are all on GitHub, it made sense to use GitHub pages for that. So I needed to fix two issues: I wanted to have colour coding of code examples much like the GitHub own templates have. I wanted to have collapsible and expandable parts of the page. I did not want to write an own JavaScript solution for that. Here is how to achieve both. You can check the CODE100 puzzle archive to see this in action. Adding source code colour coding to GitHub pages In your `config.yml` file define kra ..read more

Forget about the Vision Pro, or whatever Samsung just brought out, we all know that the pinnacle of computing fun has been released in 1982 in the form of the Commodore 64. One of the coolest things you could show people when writing BASIC on it was the following one-liner: 10 print chr$(205.5 + rnd(1));:goto 10 Executed, this resulted in a diagonal endless maze: What the one liner does is print a character with the PETSCII code 205 or 206 (or SHIFT + M and SHIFT + N) which are fat diagonal lines. It does that using the PRINT command and the CHR$() command which turns a number into a charac ..read more