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Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Remote Team Collaboration: Presentify

In the last two weeks I wrote about Zappy and Loom - tools that help you with sharing information, documenting work and collaborating visually in remote or distributed work settings. Continuing with this general theme, today I'd like to suggest another, similar tool: Presentify (Mac App Store) is macOS menu bar app that allows you to annotate any screen or highlight your cursor, no matter the context or app you're in. This makes Presentify a general-purpose presentation and teaching tool that's ...
May 24, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software
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Remote Team Collaboration: Loom – Screen & Video Recording Software

Last week I wrote about Zappy by Zapier, a tool for visually documenting and sharing your work and your underlying processes. Loom is a similar tool that - by going beyond mere screenshots with actual screen recordings - allows your team to collaborate remotely and asynchronously. From explaining and reviewing code to design critiques, customer support, sales, and employee feedback there are a variety of use cases such a tool can you help you with when it comes to efficiently organising distributed work ...
May 17, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software
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Remote Team Collaboration: Communicate via Annotated Screenshots with Zappy for macOS

Zapier is a workflow automation software I'm using extensively and which I can highly recommend. Zapier is fully distributed remote company. In order to simplify collaborating visually while working remotely they have been using a tool called "Zappy for macOS" for some time now and they've recently released it for others to use as well. Zappy allows you to quickly capture, annotate, and share screenshots with your co-workers. In their own words, Zappy is: The fastest, all-in-one way to share screenshots, GIFs, and recordings with ...
May 10, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software
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Debugging for Mobile Browsers

Occasionally, web developers need to debug a web app's behaviour in a specific browser on a specific device or class of devices. For desktop devices this usually isn't a problem because every modern browser nowadays provides a console, where application errors and custom console.log statements pile up. However, on mobile browsers there's usually no browser console, or browser development tools, for that matter. Analysing browser logs is still possible via vendors' development tools like Apple's Xcode, for example. Still, that process often ...
May 3, 2020 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Software, Web Applications
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Improving Developer UX

Software engineer and data scientist Gabriel Pickard recently has published an article about developer experience being fundamentally harder than normal UX. He defines developer experience as the user experience of the tools software developers use in order to do their job: code editors IDEs command-line tools Gabriel identifies these main aspects in which in his opinion developer tools are failing their users: Counter to any UI/UX philosophy, as programmers we find ourselves maintaining vast background knowledge about the structure and dynamics of our programs, with nary a ...
April 26, 2020 by Bjoern in Design, Software
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GDPR Transparency: Web App for Managing GDPR-related Activities in Your Company

GDPR Transparency is a web app for managing the record of processing activities (see https://gdpr-info.eu/art-30-gdpr/) and technical and organisational measures (seehttps://gdpr-info.eu/art-32-gdpr/) as required by GDPR. Since I didn't feel comfortable with the common - rather makeshift - solution of managing GDPR-related processing activities (see https://gdpr-info.eu/art-30-gdpr/) in a spreadsheet table I've created this web app called GDPR Transparency that allows you to manage that kind of information for your business: https://bjoernkw.github.io/gdpr-transparency/ The source code is available here: https://github.com/BjoernKW/gdpr-transparency GDPR Transparency is a PWA based on Angular ...
April 19, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications
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Reprise: Petro Salema – Storyteller Extraordinaire

Almost five years ago I wrote about a talk given by Petro Salema at that year's edition of beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf: Petro Salema – Designing Interfaces That Think @ beyond tellerrand Düssedorf 2015 A common advice given regarding talks and presentations, especially ones of a more technical variety, is to not just talk about technical details but to tell a story. While this piece of advice is good and well-intentioned it's not usually exemplified or specified in any more detail. Steve Jobs is ...
April 12, 2020 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Software, Web, Web Applications
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Alternative Git Workflows

In his 2018 article "4 branching workflows for Git" software developer Patrick Porto outlines these four proven Git workflows and their respective advantages and downsides: Git Flow GitHub flow GitLab Flow OneFlow While Git Flow probably is the most well-known and most widely used one of those it's also received quite some criticism for being overly complex. Even Git Flow originator Vincent Driessen, has only just recently noted that when he originally conceived of this workflow more than 10 years ago he had explicitly versioned software packages ...
April 5, 2020 by Bjoern in Software
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Don’t Just Document Software, Tell a Story.

Humans tend to remember stories much better than mere facts, which probably is why storytelling has such a long tradition in human history. Storyteller is - quoting from their own description - an "editor plugin that generates web pages that recreate and animate entire programming sessions" (see this playback repository for examples and the project's GitHub repository for more details). It's an interesting, novel take on software documentation in that instead of merely describing some current state of code and what it's supposed ...
March 29, 2020 by Bjoern in Software
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Monoliths Aren’t Inherently Bad

Self-professed minimalist developer Kelsey Hightower a few months ago wrote about monoliths being the future. The microservice design pattern has been trending in software development for quite some now. Unfortunately, more often than not it's been indiscriminately treated as a panacea to every software architecture and design problem out there. Microservices can help with one aspect specifically: Reducing deployment risk. If you have a large monolith and frequently need to make changes to a specific part or feature provided by that monolith the whole ...
March 22, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software
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