Jan 31Releasing code in large corporations is slow — and there is a good reason for itOne of the things I always loved about the web is its immediacy. You write a piece of code, publish it somewhere and people can access it. No compilation step, no packaging and distribution, no listing on marketplaces or app stores — just a push of the button. This gives…Software Development5 min readSoftware Development5 min read
Jan 24Things to do and not to do during a wave of tech layoffsCurrently we are in a huge round of tech layoffs that are reminiscent of the first .com crash in the beginning of the century. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and now Google announced layoffs in the 10k range and it seems no one is spared. …Layoffs7 min readLayoffs7 min read
Dec 23, 2022ChatGPT will not replace programmers, but Search Engines should be worriedUnless you’ve lived under a rock, you probably heard of ChatGPT, OpenAI wunderkind chat bot that seemingly gives answers to any problem you throw at it. Of course people fed it with lots of programming questions and it yielded great results. This, once again, sparked a big discussion if “AI”…Searchengines4 min readSearchengines4 min read
Dec 19, 2022Microdosing burnout — on working remote and in a different time zoneI’ve been working remotely in the EU for US companies for the last 15 years. On paper, this sounds like an excellent gig. You get the salaries and bleeding edge work of a US employee but you also get the job security that comes with a European contract. If used…Mental Health7 min readMental Health7 min read
Sep 15, 2022Celebrating 1M installs of Edge DevTools for VS CodeThe Edge DevTools for Visual Studio Code extension has over 1M downloads, time to recap a bit how it came to be When I started my current role in Microsoft one thing that ailed me was that the browser developer tools are great for debugging, but they aren’t changing the…Tooling4 min readTooling4 min read
Aug 29, 2022The sum of all knowledgeLast week my mother died. After we put her urn into the ground next to my father’s we went back to their flat to talk about next steps and dividing up their belongings amongst us three children. One thing I immediately called dibs on were my father’s two books. Both…Www5 min readWww5 min read
Aug 18, 2022You haven’t been hacked, these aren’t devices spying on you and these errors aren’t your faultIt is possible to accidentally open the developer tools in browsers. Either by pressing F12, selecting the “Inspect” option of the context menu or hitting one of the many keyboard shortcuts that open different tools. These tools can look intimidating and as if someone is hacking your computer. Especially when…Security6 min readSecurity6 min read
Apr 12, 2022One million broken web sites — and a way to prevent thatWebaim.org releases an annual report called the WebAIM Million. This is a deep analysis of the one million most visited web sites how accessible they are. And every year the result is pretty grim. Across the one million home pages, 50,829,406 distinct accessibility errors were detected — an average of…Accessibility4 min readAccessibility4 min read
Mar 14, 2022Noise cancellation for developersI like noise cancelling headphones. Using them, I can sleep better on planes and find much more detail in music I enjoy. In the office, they are a visual clue that I am currently unavailable for feedback as I want to concentrate on a task at hand.Development And Growth16 min readDevelopment And Growth16 min read
Dec 20, 2021The web starts on page 4After 25 years of working for, on and with the web, I am looking at the current state of it and I don’t like it. There is still a lot of beautiful, creative and amazing work out there, but on the whole, we lost an amazing opportunity. …Search Engines7 min readSearch Engines7 min read