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.

UX Check: Identify Usability Issues On Your Website

Recently, I came across UX Check, a Google Chrome extension that allows you to annotate usability issues according to Nielsen's ten heuristic usability evaluations. If you're dealing with website and web app usability in any way UX Check will be a useful tool and is worth checking out.

The How: Learn From Entrepreneurs

If you're an entrepreneur building upon the insights of others, learning from fellow entrepreneurs is essential. Learning from past experiences, mistakes and failures probably is the best way to succeed. Seeing what worked for other startups and what didn't will help you building a better, more sustainable business yourself. The How is a website by Lean Startup Productions that helps entrepreneurs by sharing useful tips and advice about running a startup.

Sunday February 1st, 2015 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship

Another take on the 4-Hour Workweek

Tim Ferriss' seminal book on rethinking work and living an independent, self-determined life always is worth another look. On his blog SpartanTraveller Clayton Cornell wrote a rather lengthy but very insightful post about the Myth of the 4-Hour Workweek and the very practical implications such a groundbreaking lifestyle change has. Digital nomadism, travelling the world, working from anywhere sure sounds like fun but it's easier said than done. Not only does it require determination and hard work but also very mundane obstacles like ...

Sunday January 25th, 2015 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship

FnordMetric and ChartSQL: Create Charts Directly From SQL

FnordMetric is an interesting new software package that allows you to create good-looking charts (in SVG format) directly from SQL using a query language called ChartSQL. The are quite a few examples available here. A typical ChartSQL query for a timeline series chart for instance looks like this: DRAW LINECHART WITH AXIS BOTTOM AXIS LEFT; SELECT 'data' AS series, FROM_TIMESTAMP(time) AS x, value2 * 1000 AS y FROM example_data WHERE series = "measurement2"; The software currently is ...

Sunday January 18th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software

EstiMate – Accurate Crowdsourced Software Development Estimates

Following up on last week's post I've launched a product site / MVP for EstiMate: Software development effort estimation probably is one of the more difficult tasks in software development. Even the most experienced engineers' estimates are off, too every now and then. Being a somewhat disliked task far too often effort estimation is neglected or done in a rather haphazard way. EstiMate tries to solve this problem with a measurable and reliable method for effort estimation that's based on actual data ...

Sunday January 11th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Software

About the Pitfalls Of Software Development Effort Estimation

Software development effort estimation probably is one of the most disliked, even feared tasks in software development and computer science in general. However crucial, even the most experienced engineers succumb to common pitfalls from time to time or their estimates are off, too every now and then. This is an especially striking phenomenon because software development effort estimation actually is a well-researched subject that a plethora has been written about. Starting in the 1950s IBM did a tremendous amount of research on ...

Sunday January 4th, 2015 by Bjoern in Business, Software

FormatJS: Localize dates and numbers

Internationalization and localization still is a somewhat difficult problem in software development. FormatJS is a collection of JavaScript libraries that addresses a part of this problem by formatting dates and numbers according to a selected locale. It makes clever use of pluralization and natural language patterns so the output strings read like a natural language utterance instead of a computer-generated string, for example it generates these outputs for 0, 1 and 1,000 items, respectively: "Annie took no photos on December 14, 2014." "Annie took ...

Sunday December 28th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

ZenQuery is now open source

Today I made ZenQuery available as open source (under the Apache License). ZenQuery is an 'Enterprise Backend as a Service' and allows you to easily access databases through a REST API without any programming knowledge required. Get SQL result sets as JSON, XML or CSV data, which can easily be processed by tools such as MS Excel or in your own applications. ZenQuery provides you with an instant REST API for your SQL queries. Anything that can be expressed by SELECT * FROM ...

Saturday December 20th, 2014 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Monetizing Open Source Software Is Still Hard

Some weeks ago the guys behind LocomotiveCMS - an open source CMS that's competing with Wordpress - published a sobering article on how they failed making a profit with open source software so far. Their model basically relies on building reputation from their open source work and benefit from community contributions to their software. Their revenue is generated from both doing consulting for LocomotiveCMS and selling hosting services in a SaaS package. Not too unusual a model. The harsh reality - however - ...

Sunday December 14th, 2014 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Software

The Future of Software

In an article titled Programming: easier, better, faster, stronger. Giuliano Iacobelli of Stamplay writes about how programming might become easier, faster and more reliable in the future while decoupling creation of business logic from the need to write actual code. It's an important subject I've written about time and time again: How do we make programming more observable and more responsive? How do we allow more people to turn ideas and business processes into software? As Chris Dixon puts it: Software not only ...

Sunday December 7th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.