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.

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 ...

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

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.

Sunday February 8th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web Applications

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

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.