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.

SheetJS – Parse And Manipulate Excel Spreadsheets In The Browser

SheetJS (source code available on GitHub) is an extremely useful JavaScript library that enables you to have Microsoft Excel spreadsheets parsed directly in the browser without any backend interaction necessary. What makes SheetJS even more impressive is the ability to query spreadsheets in-place with an SQLite-compatible SQL language called WebSQL. Check out the example on the website to see how awesome this is. Together with a grid component such as Handsontable (source code) SheetJS allows for on-the-fly display, querying and manipulation of Excel ...

favico.js – Dynamic Content For Your Favicon

favico.js (source code on GitHub) is an interesting and possibly quite useful library that makes it possible to show dynamic, animated content in your web app's favicon. While it allows you to display all sorts of visual next to the browser's address bar - such as videos or even web cams live streams - the most useful use case favico.js lends itself to probably is displaying badges and notifications. favico.js provides animations, colour customization and custom fonts for these badges. Check out the ...

Sunday April 12th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web Applications

I don’t want an app for that

Scott Adams of Dilbert fame recently posted an article on why your phone interface is a legacy train wreck. He argues that the way we interact with our smartphones goes all the way back to the beginning of desktop computing. In spite of what Apple probably would have us believe - in spite of swiping, tapping and multitouch - we're still largely using our computing devices as if they were a 1987 IBM PC running Microsoft Word or Excel: When trying ...

Sunday April 5th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Mobile Applications, Web

Antiwork – Rethinking Work Ethic Or: Hard Work is Not Working

In a highly interesting recent article Brian Dean calls for a a radical shift in how we view “jobs”. He poses a seemingly radical question: "Over a decade into the 21st century, we seem as work-obsessed as ever. Is it time for a progressive reframing of work and leisure?" Drawing upon other recent articles such as the already famous one by anthropologist David Graeber on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs Dean argues that in the 21s century our work culture and work ethic is ...

Sunday March 29th, 2015 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship

Eko: A Digital Stethoscope Add-On

At times you come across novel designs and solutions and instantly think "Of course. Why hasn't anybody thought about this before?". One such moment for me recently was finding out about Eko, a digital device that can be connected to almost every make of traditional analogue stethoscopes. Once connected, Eko automatically collects, amplifies and filters audio data recorded from the stethoscope's membrane. This data can be analyzed with accompanying software in order to find patterns. Eko looks like an excellent design that not ...

Sunday March 22nd, 2015 by Bjoern in Design

Regular Languages Are … well … Regular

A few weeks ago I came across an article describing "A regular expression to check for prime numbers". I was intrigued because processes defined by formal regular languages have an inherently linear runtime while the process described is non-linear. This contradicts the definition of regular languages, specifically the Pumping Lemma. So, how is this even possible? Well, the regular expression discussed in this article and the regex framework it's used with makes clever use of backtracking for realizing this 'magic'. Quite simply, the ...

Sunday March 15th, 2015 by Bjoern in Software

Caring

Recently, I've read two interesting stories about people who genuinely care about helping others and how as a consequence everyone involved benefits. One of those articles is titled "How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire" and describes the outcome of a hiring process. Brooke Allen, the hiring manager, describes how he not just gave feedback to the candidates that ultimately weren't hired as to how they might improve their skills but actively and ...

Sunday March 8th, 2015 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship

GoodUI Datastories

GoodUI Datastories is a new service that promises to provide companies with tried and tested UI concepts. Not every company has the time, resources and sheer number of users required to do proper A/B testing. GoodUI Datastories tries to alleviate this problem by sharing ideas and UX patterns that have been proven to work for others, e.g.: Try Smaller Commitments instead of one big one. The service allows users to submit their ideas including screenshots and traffic / conversion data as evidence the ...

Sunday March 1st, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web, Web Applications

Email as a Personal API

Some time ago I came across a concept by Marc Bevand advocating email as a Decentralized API to Personal Information. In this post he outlines the idea that - email being such a pervasive tool to the extent that nearly everyone uses it - a personal, distributed and decentralized API layer could be built on top of it. The basic idea is this: Email could be used as a protocol for transactions and automatically exchanging information. Take these use cases for example: Automatically ...

Sunday February 22nd, 2015 by Bjoern in Ideas, Web

Timothy Dexter – The man who carried coals to Newcastle … and turned a profit

Timothy Dexter was a colourful 18th century American businessman noted for his eccentricity and his eerily acute business sense that in most cases flouted common sense. Among others his business feats include: delivering warming pans to the West Indies, where they were sold for a profit for use as ladles in the local molasses industry shipping gloves to Polynesia, where they were bought by Portuguese merchants on their way to China, who coincidentally anchored there at the time his shipment arrived amassing early Continental Dollars ...

Sunday February 15th, 2015 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.