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.

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 ...

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

Reasons to: 2016 – Opening Titles by Mike Brondbjerg

This week I was in the wonderful seaside city of Brighton for the Reasons to: 2016 conference. While I haven't yet had the time for a proper write-up of the event, the amazing opening titles by Mike Brondbjerg are already available: Reasons to: 2016 - Opening Titles - Mike Brondbjerg from Reasons to on Vimeo. The entire visuals are generated by code and react to the music! With Jared Tarbell and Joshua Davis as two of the speakers, generative art, data visualization and ...

Sunday September 11th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Rules of Acquisition

From the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition: 3. Never spend more for an acquisition than you have to. 35. Peace is good for business. 125. You can't make a deal if you're dead. ... In a recent online discussion involving ethics somebody only somewhat jokingly said something along the lines of "Most people only abide by the Rules of Acquisition anyway." and I thought to myself: Would that really be so bad? In case you don't know him, this handsome gentleman is Quark, bar ...

Sunday September 4th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship

Best I Can

Sunday August 28th, 2016 by Bjoern in Music

Code means communication

Writing software is all about communication. Code is a way of conveying the meaning of natural language requirements in an exact manner so that computers can make sense of the intentions of our fickle human minds and the often ambiguous ways we tend to express ourselves in. So, in that respect software development amounts to translating human concepts and notions into a language machines can understand. However, communicating with machines is only one, more technical aspect, of writing software. The by far more important ...

Sunday August 21st, 2016 by Bjoern in Software

William Hertling – Kill Process

I've recently finished listening to the audio version of William Hertling's latest novel "Kill Process" I think it's fair to say that I'm quite a fan of his novels and his writing. Kill Process is a bit of a departure from Hertling's Singularity series in that it doesn't deal with future events and science fiction technology but mostly takes place in the present day with a few exceptions for flashbacks to previous events in the protagonist's life. The novel has been described as ...

Sunday August 14th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Ideas, Software, Web

Libraries.io and Dependency CI: Open Source Library Discovery and Dependency QA

Recently, I came across Libraries.io and its companion service Dependency CI. Open Source Library Discovery and Dependency QA

Sunday August 7th, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Shadow Gallery – I Believe

Shadow Gallery is one of those lesser known bands in progressive metal that deserve to have made the big time but unfortunately for one reason or another never did. Their most quintessential work so far probably is their 1998 album Tyranny still featuring singer Mike Baker, who unfortunately died in 2008. The album and particular this song I Believe (featuring a well-known guest singer from a highly successful progressive metal band ...) capture ideas and feelings that were prevalent with hackers, civil ...

Sunday July 31st, 2016 by Bjoern in Music, Web

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.