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.

Julian Treasure: How to speak so that people want to listen

In this TED talk sound expert and public speaking coach Julian Treasure outlines how to effectively use your voice to deliver a message and make people want to listen to what you have to say: While of course regarding a complex subject like skillfully using your voice and speaking in public effectively such a short video can by no means be comprehensive it gives a good idea about the key ingredients of getting your message across. In a larger context, Julian also briefly ...

The State Of JavaScript 2016: A Survey

A recent survey by Sacha Greif gives a comprehensive overview of the current state of the JavaScript world. Front-end, full-stack, testing, mobile: If you're working with JavaScript in any way this survey has you covered! It gives you a great overview of what's in use right now and what might be in the near future. The survey will be done annually. So, it should be possible to see where the JavaScript world is headed and which predictions turned out to be true by ...

Sunday November 13th, 2016 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Writing Disposable Code, Not Reusable Code

In an article about common software over-engineering mistakes Subhas Dandapani provides a lot of useful insights on why software often is over-engineered - sometimes to the extent it becomes unmaintainable. From my experience, the by far most frequent cause of over-engineered and overly complex software is engineers trying to anticipate requirements and potential future use cases. Everything has to be abstract in order to accommodate any possible use case business might come up with. Repetition is generally regarded as waste. Engineers hate ...

Sunday November 6th, 2016 by Bjoern in Software

Possible Brexit Fallout: Decentralization

While some things are still certain after the Brexit vote in June, most aren't. Though the argument that won the day was all about "taking back control" of the country, at least short term a quite likely result might be that nothing much will change in terms of control and the people will have merely exchanged one aloof, self-serving elite for another. I still think that Brexit is a royally stupid idea but in the end only time will tell. A crisis is ...

Sunday October 30th, 2016 by Bjoern in Ideas

UI Movement

UI Movement is a website that showcases user interface designs on a daily basis as an inspiration for your own designs. The designs itself are mostly sourced from Dribbble - the show and tell site for designers. Originally just a newsletter in the vein of an MVP, UI Movement has developed into a fully-fledged website with designs organised in categories such as commerce, dashboard or menu.

Sunday October 23rd, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Mockito 2 now available

Last week version 2.1.0 of the Mockito testing framework for Java has been released. For more information on this latest iteration check out this page. As the name suggests, Mockito allows you to mock object behaviour during unit tests. When writing unit tests you only want to test a particular unit's behaviour (hence the name). Depending on the programming language used such a unit might be a function, a procedure or - most commonly in today's object-oriented programming environments - a ...

Sunday October 16th, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Anti-patterns: Rewriting Software

It's one of those fallacious patterns in software development that though well-known to cause trouble without creating any significant benefit unfortunately ever seems to truly go away: The Software Rewrite. In general, software developers tend to not particularly like working on old - or legacy - code, especially if it's not been written by themselves or if they feel that due to aspects like time and budget constraints they didn't have the opportunity to get the software architecture right from the get-go. ...

Sunday October 9th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship, Software

Less Is More

What's true for design in general certainly is true for software design in particular: Less is more - or paraphrasing Dieter Rams - "Write less software in order to write better software." A few weeks ago I read this interesting article by web accessibility consultant Heydon Pickering. In this blog post he argues that the only foolproof way of writing performant web applications is to write less code. Sure, all that fancy minification, transpiling, JIT / AoT compilation and optimisation stuff might ...

Sunday October 2nd, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Explorable Explanations And A Reactive Document IDE

It's no secret I'm a fan of Bret Victor's work and the notion that programming tools should interact with coding and provide immediate, responsive feedback to changes. Recently, I've come across two intriguing projects / products that both draw upon this idea: Carbide (currently available as an early alpha version) is a new kind of JavaScript IDE that both immediately visualises the result of code changes and allows you to manipulate and visually interact with your code using UI controls such as sliders. Explorable ...

Sunday September 25th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web

Daily Standup Meetings: Anti-patterns And What to Do About Them

Daily standup meetings are a mainstay of agile software development methods, such as XP, Kanban (which used to be an inventory control system having originated at Toyota) and Scrum, of course. Given that agile development methods are by far the most dominant ones in the software industry today, it should come as no surprise that daily standup meetings are a common feature of software development processes these days. These meetings basically serve the purpose of informing everyone on the team about these 3 ...

Sunday September 18th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.