my blog. for you.

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.

‘Agile’ isn’t a new way of doing software development, it’s the normal way

Recently, during a conversation on software development "methodologies" (just the word "methodology" makes me cringe because it's a needlessly convoluted and complicated notion) one of the participants said something along the lines of "'Agile' isn't for everyone. Most people just aren't cut out for doing software development that way.". I strongly contest that notion. 'Agile' has become some bullshit bingo term that's slung around in order to perpetuate precisely those misconceptions the Agile Manifesto intended to upend. 'Agile' unfortunately is often seen ...

Dan Bricklin – Inventor of the Electronic Spreadsheet

Today startup entrepreneurs are celebrated for disrupting industries and changing the world. Marc Andreessen is famously quoted with the statement "Software is eating the world!". Back in the days when software was nothing but a nascent industry, Dan Bricklin both changed the world with software, disrupted not one industry but several at the same time and in fact almost single-handedly created the industry of small business software. His name nowadays isn't exactly well known as is the software he created. The new ...

Sunday March 19th, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Keeping database schemas up-to-date with Flyway

At least ever since Ruby on Rails' Active Record Migrations put an emphasis on keeping database schemas consistent with your software's source code both during development and in production database migration tools have become a staple in modern software development. Database migration (or database refactoring as this technique is sometimes called as well) tools allow you to apply data definition language (DDL) statements like "CREATE TABLE ..." or "ALTER ..." to databases in an automated, consistent and traceable manner instead of either ...

Sunday March 12th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Learning React Native Through Responsiveness and Instant Feedback

React Native Express is an interactive guide that enables you to learn React Native right in the browser. Getting started with React Native - and React for that matter - can be quite daunting. While the framework itself isn't all that difficult to grasp there are quite a few tools like transpilers such as Babel and state management libraries like Redux which are required for getting productive with React Native. React Native Express attempts to ease you in and make that initial ...

Sunday March 5th, 2017 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Design & Quantum Superposition

Last year, Hungarian designer Csongor Bartus published a thought-provoking article I've only recently come across. Quantum mechanics and design are two words you don't often see juxtaposed and probably rightfully so. No, I've not gone crazy and I'm not going to go down some weird esoteric "Quantum Design" rabbit hole here. However, Csongor borrows the term superposition from quantum mechanics as a metaphor for an interesting new angle on design for the web: To cut in, let's equip all content with all states ...

Sunday February 26th, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web, Web Applications

Documentation and Spreadsheets with an API: GitBook and Fieldbook

Continuing on last week's post about RunKit - a Node.js prototyping environment for the browser - here are two interesting tools that make use of RunKit: GitBook is a collaborative documentation tool that allows you to create beautiful, version-controlled documentation for your software. It's used by software components like Redux and it leverages RunKit to embed live, reactive code examples in your documentation. Fieldbook is was a database creation tool thats touted as "A database with an API – as simple as a ...

Sunday February 19th, 2017 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

RunKit: Instant, reproducible JavaScript playgrounds

I'm a huge proponent of the idea that programming tools should directly interact with coding and provide immediate, responsive feedback to changes. RunKit is such a tool that offers a comprehensive JavaScript / Node.js prototyping environment. The service supplies you with instant, sandboxed Node.js instances called "notebooks" that allow you to experiment with the whole gamut of NPM modules. Moreover, "from graphs and maps to low level hexadecimal inspectors" RunKit offers data visualisations for immediate visual feedback. Once done you can showcase your ...

Sunday February 12th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Deploying Spring Boot applications as old-fashioned WAR files

Spring Boot is an opinionated convention-over-configuration framework for creating stand-alone Spring-based Java applications. Its objective is to provide you with a preselected best practice choice of libraries (both from the Spring platform and by third parties) for a given task, e.g. building a web application that connects to a database and provides REST resources creating a scheduled batch task that exports and aggregates data from various data sources providing an API that connects to SOAP Web Services It both helps you with getting started quickly and ...

Sunday February 5th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Exporting table data in web applications as CSV or Excel files

In business applications being able to export data to Microsoft Excel is a very common requirement. In most business environments Excel is the go-to tool for business analytics and quick-and-easy data processing. Hence, being able to communicate with Excel is an essential feature for most kinds of business software. The usual approach for meeting that requirement is generating a CSV file on the server. However, while simple this approach can come with a few downsides: While CSV is a useful, accessible plain text ...

Sunday January 29th, 2017 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Co-create

Half a house is a 99% Invisible (a podcast about anything design and architecture - highly recommended if you haven't subscribed yet) episode about a housing project in the Chilean town of Constitución. After an 8.8 magnitude earthquake in 2010 the people of Constitución were in dire need of affordable housing. The solution the Chilean architecture firm Elemental, who were tasked with the project, came up with is equally radical and beautiful. It epitomises the spirit of co-creation and design principles like Wabi-sabi. ...

Sunday January 22nd, 2017 by Bjoern in Design

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.