Robert Helmer

Split-panel pastel illustration with the caption “Are you gonna be #1 or a 0?” Above, on the left, a confident woman in a pink blazer holds a shiny gold number one trophy. Below her is a red error message reading “Error: exit status 1.” On the right, a chill woman with lavender hair in a teal hoodie holds a glowing number zero while sitting at a sticker-covered laptop. Her side is labeled with a green success message: “Success: exit status 0.” Beneath both panels is the tagline “REAL ONES EXIT 0” in bold lettering. This meme-style artwork plays on Unix shell conventions, where a process that finishes successfully exits with status code 0, and errors exit with code 1 or higher. The cultural punchline flips mainstream notions of “being number one” by celebrating stability, quiet success, and correct code execution over flashier but broken performance. It’s beloved by coders, DevOps engineers, and anyone who’s spent late nights chasing green checkmarks in CI pipelines. This is terminal humor with pastel swagger—where “zero” isn’t nothing, it’s everything. Real ones don’t crash, they compile, deploy, and vibe out in soft hoodies with stickered laptops and clean logs.

My humor?
Terminal.

07.07.2025 23:11 — 👍 84    🔁 6    💬 7    📌 0

Music notes looking like a smiling face

Funny guy

25.06.2025 02:13 — 👍 4953    🔁 318    💬 87    📌 17

Can You Ditch Cookie Banners and Still Get Useful Analytics? Explore cookieless analytics with Umami to ditch cookie banners while keeping useful insights. Privacy-first approach to GDPR compliance.

Everyone hates cookie banners—users ignore them, conversions drop, compliance is messy.

I tested cookieless approaches that eliminate banners. Promising results, but legal nuances matter.

My findings: rhelmer.org/blog/privacy-analytics-without-cookie-banners/

20.06.2025 02:17 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 1

Automatic, Configurable Analytics for Umami with umami-kit Umami Kit is a drop-in enhancement for Umami Analytics. Scroll depth, time-on-page, visibility, and click tracking—no cookies, configurable, and privacy-first.

A privacy-first analytics enhancement for @umami — adds scroll depth, time-on-page, visibility, click tracking, and more.

- No cookies
- First-party tracking
- Just one script tag to get started

www.rhelmer.org/blog/automat...

#UmamiAnalytics #PrivacyTech #OpenSource #Analytics #WebDev

07.06.2025 19:07 — 👍 2    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

GitHub - rhelmer/magicor: Magicor is a puzzle game similar to Solomons Key, but quite different. Magicor is a puzzle game similar to Solomons Key, but quite different. - rhelmer/magicor

Github repo is here: github.com/rhelmer/magi... it works a little better locally, if you have trouble with the resolution of web version looking wrong try entering/existing full screen.

06.03.2025 02:20 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

magicor

A contributor just fixed a game-breaking bug in my old Magicor fork! This game is nostalgic for me since my kids and I used to play it when they were little. I ported it to Python 3 & Pygame, and I'm updating the WASM version for better web play: www.rhelmer.org/magicor/ 🎮 🐧 #gamedev #Magicor

06.03.2025 01:45 — 👍 4    🔁 1    💬 1    📌 0

Rewriting my 17-year-old Breakout! clone for the modern web A post about rewriting my 17-year-old Breakout! clone, now named Meteor Bounce hosted by Stellar Whiskers Games

Quick post about re-writing my 17-year-old Breakout! clone www.rhelmer.org/blog/rewriti... #webdev #gamedev #buildinpublic

14.02.2025 02:58 — 👍 6    🔁 0    💬 1    📌 0

Comparing game development using C and SDL vs. Godot vs. Web A post comparing and contrasting game development using C and SDL, Godot, and a pure web approach, from a cross-platform perspective.

I reimplemented the same game (Reversi) in Godot, Typescript and C+SDL to compare (so you don't have to!) www.rhelmer.org/blog/game-de... #gamedev #webdev #godot

20.01.2025 20:12 — 👍 9    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

I've added a video to the post showing highlight.io live view on the left as I play the game in a browser on the right youtu.be/H_1KrXpJ1cs?...

10.01.2025 05:33 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Building a Cross-Browser Web Extension with React, Astro, Svelte, and Angular Step-by-step guide to creating a web extension in React, Astro, Svelte, and Angular for Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, and Safari.

My old blog post about experimenting with React for the `about:addons` UI in Firefox (spoiler: Firefox uses Lit now) keeps getting search engine traffic for people looking for how to build browser extensions in React, so I made one that covers a bunch of frameworks: www.rhelmer.org/blog/browser...

09.01.2025 06:34 — 👍 0    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Observability in Godot Web games with Highlight.io Learn how to enable observability for Godot Web games for errors and session record/replay with highlight.io to see how people play your game

www.rhelmer.org/blog/observa... #webdev #gamedev #godot #indiedev

06.01.2025 21:50 — 👍 7    🔁 1    💬 1    📌 0

My Modern Website Hosting Stack for 2025 An overview of my modern approach to hosting and optimizing websites.

Just published my first blog post in quite a while! Sharing my 2025 website hosting setup guide using Astro + Azure Blob Storage + Cloudflare Workers for fast, scalable, and cost-effective sites. www.rhelmer.org/blog/how-i-a... #webdev #perfmatters

02.01.2025 00:54 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0