2025-04-28 21:40:18
Last Saturday was my 50th birthday and it’s as good a time as any to reminisce a bit.
First of all: don’t believe the Stranger Things image of the 1980s. They were not a time of leg warmers and neon colours. They were a time of social unrest, existential anxiety and lots of worries about survival because of short-sighted politics and choices in using technology.
I grew up in a small, 3000 inhabitant village next to a slightly bigger factory town. In town we had roughly 1/5th foreign workers which meant racism and integration issues. We also had lots of American soldiers stationed in three different barracks up until 2014. You can imagine what clubbing and pub life looked like.
My home village also was interesting because it had a huge nuclear power plant. As this was the 80s, this also meant a lot of clashes of police and environmentalist groups. This escalated from 1986 on when, on my birthday, the Chernobyl disaster happened.
Whilst being very young in the 80s, I mostly remember these things. I also remember spending a lot of time at union rallies and workers protests as my father was a coal miner turned factory worker. And I remember ashtrays everywhere. Even in the first McDonalds that opened in town. The 80s were not shiny and cool. They stank, the politics were those of fear of clashes between the East and the West and we all worried about ecological disasters with acid rain and deforestation being the main issues. There was also a pretty weird shift back to traditional values and a rise of religion as dogma instead of making humans living together simpler.
The good news is that this led to a lot of good subcultures, movies and excellent music.
These 80s made me who I am: someone interested in politics, a green leftist. Just writing these things down right now also makes me annoyed that the current world is in exactly the same position again. We are and should be worried about the ecological future of this world. We should be worried about politics, terrorism and wars that are happening right now. And we should be very concerned about populist and isolationist political parties gaining power in almost every country playing with people’s fears and pointing fingers to outsiders.
But I am also thankful for being part of the generation I was born in. Because I had so many wonderful first experiences. Especially in the world of technology. I’ve witnessed rotary phones going out of style and being replaced by those with buttons. I remember satellite dishes giving us more options on television. I remember cinemas you could smoke in – oh and people did! I remember Vinyl turning to Cassette Tapes and then CDs, Video CDs, VHS tapes and I even saw a laser disk once. I remember the first mobile phones and I also remember not being allowed to use them at petrol stations as they were considered a fire hazard. I also remember the first Microwave and my parents going nuts when you opened them before the “bing” as that probably meant that dangerous radiation was leaking.
As the fourth child of my family, I remember having to wear some of their old, outdated clothes but also inheriting a big box of lego bricks from them. A box that had no instructions and Lego wasn’t branded or allowed you to only build one thing. I am pretty sure that playing with Legos made me a software engineer, as this is what we do – we connect things to make other things. Except there is no fixed physical final product, but a flexible solution.
I remember most fondly that everything was accessible to repair and alteration. I inherited my siblings’ old bikes and instead of having one of the cool BMX bikes you saw on tele, I put thicker tires on the one I had and pretended I could do the same things with it. Before my first car, I had a 25cc motorised bike that by law can only go up to 25kph. Of course we found out that by adding another exhaust and using a drill to expand the engine outlet you can get it to 70kph. This was anything but safe and if the police had caught me I would never have gotten a driver’s license.
I remember my first cars, an old Golf 1, Renault 5 and then my last car before I moved away, a trusty Fiat Panda. They all sucked compared to what our Skoda Scala can do now, but there were screws and space everywhere in the engine and the chassis that allowed me to fix and extend things. And the Panda had a stereo and I had lots of tapes with noisy, angry punk anthems. I remember parties where we had a radio and 3 tapes we just played. Not arguing over which one of the 231242342342 songs offered on streaming we should listen to next.
But I am mostly happy about “earning” the internet and the computing environment we have now. I saved up money doing odd jobs to afford my first computer – a Thompson TO7-70 connected to a black and white TV. I then got my first C-64 and with it also my first modem and connecting to BBSes, chatting on IRC, uploading content to FTPs and getting my first email.
Soon after that I got my first PCs and extended memory and hard disks as I needed more power. Computing was a hobby but also more than that. It was my gateway to the world. I’ve always had pen-pals in other countries. I also swapped floppy disks with people as letters in the whole world. One reason was that I wanted to watch movies that weren’t dubbed in German, so I would get VHS tapes from friends in the Netherlands. BBSes and IRC made that even easier.
But the best was when the web came about. At that time I worked in a radio station as part of the news team, mixing my passion for music and politics. And once I had access to the internet everything changed. I quit my job, I learned everything I could about HTML and setting up a server and the rest is history. Accessing the internet was a pain, you connected with a modem and hoped for a steady connection. You paid per second which means often you’d surf a lot and then go offline to find the images that took ages to load in the cache and move it from there. Hosting was expensive and hard to come by unless you used a free service full of ads.
But I knew this changed everything and it became my career. I want some of the things that formed me to still be around. I want things to be repairable, open and extensible. I want people to not be happy with what they get offered but demand to be able to own it and improve it. And, above all, I want the next generations to be able to live on this planet. And I really want us to move on and become better humans, and not go back to a time where fear and misinformation controlled the politics and the media. We have it in our hands to demand better, and whilst I am now the same age as old people, I will not stop.
2025-04-18 18:19:58
In a moment of boredom, I wrote a little app/web page that shows lovely words we should be using more. It is done in plain HTML, JavaScript, and some CSS. The source code is available, and I am also happy to receive pull requests adding more lovely words.
This is not what I wanted to talk about today. Instead, I wanted to talk about a thing I used that I don’t see being used in the wild enough: Description Lists. Never heard of them? You are not alone…
HTML, as you may remember, is not about adding look and feel to a document, but about giving it structure. A definition list is the right thing to use when you have a list of terms and definitions. This is a pretty common thing on the web, and yet I hardly ever see any in use. The first time I came across a description list was in the bookmarks.htm file of Netscape. Here is how description lists are defined:
Without any CSS they render as terms on lines with a break and descriptions with an indent.
It may be that people don’t know about or don’t use description lists as they have a syntax that is different from other lists. Both unordered (UL) and ordered (OL) lists are parent elements to one or more list item (LI) elements. Description lists are different. The DL element is the direct parent to both the term (DT) and the description element (DD), and there can be more than one of each. Some terms have more than one description, and one description may apply to various terms. MDN has some great demos:
The practical upshot of using description lists is that you have baked-in accessibility. Both the term and the description get announced as roles to assistive technology. You can spot-check that using the element picker in the browser developer tools.
Another excellent example on MDN is that you can use description lists to describe metadata as a list of key-value pairs:
So, next time you have a list of items you want to describe, why not reach deeper into the HTML treasure chest and use a description list?
2025-04-16 23:33:49
As someone curating a newsletter and dabbling in AI, I am feeling both overwhelmed and bored with news about yet another AI model being released by Company XYZ that will be a “game changer” and “leaves the others in the dust”. It feels hard to guess what I should be excited about. The size of the model? Who owns it and what it costs to use? It’s terms and conditions? What it is good for? If I can use it although I live in Europe?
If I check Cursor’s list of possible models I have no idea what each of them mean and it feels weird to see minor versions of each…
It doesn’t help that the names of the models and their descriptions on Huggingface don’t make much sense to me or anyone who isn’t deeply involved in Machine Learning. And it doesn’t help either that news outlets and company marketing blogs don’t stop covering us in hyperbole headlines about them instead of selling them through case studies.
This is nothing new. We had the same with AJAX libraries, frameworks and CSS libraries before. But if we consider the amount of energy and computation power that goes into training and weighing models this seems a lot more wasteful. What we need is fewer news about models and more information what each of them is good for. Right now, it feels much more like a size competition rather than a competition of which is more applicable. It also doesn’t help that the few benchmarks we have continue to be rigged and skewed. This is something we already had during the browser wars, so thank you, but no.
I’m much more excited reporting and learning from case studies of people who used different models and found one or the other more appropriate. So, if you have those, please don’t hold back posting these.
2025-03-25 01:51:09
On Thursday this week I will be in Vienna to moderate the WeAreDevelopers WebDev & AI Day and I am chuffed to bits that I managed to get such an amazing line-up together!
The event is an online event and you can follow on your computer. It starts at 16:00 and ends at 20:30. Tickets are 79 Euro and I can not stop you from showing the stream on a monitor and invite others along…
The show starts with Laurie Voss who I worked with at Yahoo and who now keeps posting insightful AI stuff almost weekly. He’ll talk about “AI and the future of software development”:
AI represents a massive change in the way software works, a leap forward. It also presents an opportunity for a massive change in the way software is written. AI-assisted coding may be an entirely new level of abstraction that sits on top of traditional programming languages and unlocks a huge new generation of software developers. In this talk, we’ll explore what this change looks like, how it came to be, and why it’s nothing to be scared of. And remember: there’s no such thing as “the fundamentals”.
Next is Hannah Foxwell with “Platform Engineering and DevEx for Your On-Prem LLMs”
I then lead a panel discussion on the topic of “Developing in an AI world – are we all demoted to reviewers?”
As developers, the new AI world seems great, but also strange. Originally we saw ourselves as creators, writers of code and owners of the functionality. In a world where more and more code is generated and users build throwaway applications it can feel like we’re losing control. In this panel we will discuss what that means in terms of ownership, security, quality and maybe find that not all is eaten as hot as it is cooked.
The all-star cast of this one is Thomas Steiner (Google), Laurie Voss (Llamaindex), Rizèl Scarlett (Block) and Rey Bango (my former Boss at Microsoft, colleague at Mozilla and also of Ajaxian fame). This will rock!
We then continue with Thomas Steiner covering “AI right in the browser with Chrome’s built-in AI APIs”
In this talk, Thomas Steiner from Google Chrome’s AI team dives into the various built-in AI APIs that the team is currently exploring. First, there’s the exploratory Prompt API that allows for free-form interactions with the Gemini Nano model. Second, there are the different task APIs that are fine-tuned to work well for a particular task like translations, language detection, summarization, and writing or rewriting. After introducing the APIs, the final part of the talk focuses on demos, applications, and use cases unlocked through these APIs.
Then there’s another highlight with Kris Rasmussen, the Chief Technology Officer of Figma, who will chat with me about ”
Honing craft and quality in an AI-powered world”:
Real-time, browser-based environments helped shift the product-building paradigm toward more open and collaborative ways of working. As barriers between design and development continue to come down, and AI-powered tools make it easier for anyone to build, the question today is how will product development continue to improve and evolve? How might functions and roles converge? And how might developers focus on quality and craftsmanship in an increasingly AI-powered world?
And the day ends with me spent and Simon Maple of Tessl talking about “Navigating AI Native Development: The Future of Software and the Power of Prompting”
AI is reshaping the way we build software, shifting from code-centric to spec-centric development—where developers define what they want, and AI determines how to achieve it. But how do we get there? In this session, we’ll explore what AI Native Development means for the open ecosystem, why it’s worth pursuing, and how we can apply lessons from cloud-native and DevOps transformations to make it a reality.We’ll also look at the practical side understanding how the craft of prompt engineering can help us refine structured specifications to improve results. By experimenting with different prompting techniques and validation methods, you’ll gain actionable strategies for guiding AI tools more effectively.
All of this for a measly 79 Euro, so why not go and get a ticket ?
2025-03-12 14:01:31
As part of my job, I have to keep up with the social media space and I’m worried, bored and annoyed in equal measures. There is not much social about it any longer. Instead it’s become a race to the bottom of lowest common denominator content. And interaction bait. Or rage bait. Or just obvious spam disguised in seemingly sophisticated sound bites generated by AI. I never thought I would miss listicles and “50 things you didn’t know about X – number 16 will surprise you” posts, but these at least were obvious.
The problem is that social media has become a game of numbers much like SEO used to be. Posting because you learned something, found something interesting or created something has given way to feeding the machine for more clicks and interactions. The reason is monetisation. The rules of the platforms discourage creativity and authenticity and prefer short-lived bursts of emotion. Keep the noise flowing, signals are not in fashion any longer.
When I had some highly successful posts on Facebook, I automatically got “promoted” to “digital creator” which is such a generic term, it makes me want to stop altogether.
I don’t want to be a “digital creator”. I also don’t want to be a “content creator”. Either sound to me like you should create anything to fill up the platform. It’s stacking digital shelves with empty boxes, not creation. And it’s about deception. Take the following examples that should be punished and removed by Facebook but despite reporting them over and over again, you keep seeing them.
Posts that show content from others and hide things like “the history of BMW” in the “see more” section:
Posts that show one type of content and have tons of hashtags of highly engaged topics utterly unrelated to the content.
I understand the latter as people navigate social media by hashtags, not by search. But it also saddens me as hashtags were a community invention – thanks to Chris Messina – and now are just a deception. I have a hard time even understanding giving me the history of BMW in a dog picture post. Do people search for something like that on Facebook? As far as I understand, Facebook doesn’t show up on web search results. Other than Pinterest in images searches, which is another annoyance…
On the web, both of those would have been punished by Google and Bing for obvious spamming. On social media, these are rampant. And you know what? They are digital content and their creators (most likely a script) are “digital creators”. We should be more than that.
As a maintainer of a blog, editor of an online magazine, curator of a newsletter read by 200k subscribers and host of a weekly show on YouTube I get about 20 requests a week if I want to look at a revolutionary AI product that can automatically create digital content for me.
You can create blog posts, images, videos and podcasts using “extremely life-like voices” or even clone your own voice, image or video presence. I don’t want them. I don’t think any creator should use those. We cheapen the end results for sake of an ongoing cadence and we cheat ourselves out of the joy of creating something.
Our goal should be to post something we enjoy doing. Or something that brightens the day of others or gives them something to think any. Our contributions should make social media a happy little cloud full of blotches and weirdness. Not a well oiled perfect creation machine of cookie cutter, highly ephemeral “digital content”.
I am a writer when I write articles, posts and books. I’m an artist when I paint. I’m a designer when I manipulate photos and create logos. I’m a composer when I make music. I’m sort of an actor when I create short videos. And I’m a teacher and educator when I give talks. Because I care. I don’t want to compete in a race to keep people occupied and I don’t think anyone should.
The question is why you take part in social media.
Me, I’m happy with the reach I gained. I’m very happy about all the connections I found and people I got to know from social media over the years. But I can’t be bothered with platforms that allow obvious spam and highly manipulative content and have policies that value vapid interaction over real discourse and original content.
Good thing I have this blog. Here is where I make the rules. Maybe this will get a lot of readers, maybe it won’t. I don’t make any money with it either way. It’s out of my head now, and that is what counts. Do wonderful things that make you happy, folks. Chasing the numbers will not give you any fulfilment. Quite the opposite.
