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.

Robin Christopherson – Technology – The Power And The Promise

Some time ago I wrote about Robin Christopherson's talk on accessible and inclusive design at beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2014. A video of this excellent talk is now online: Robin Christopherson – Technology - The Power And The Promise – beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2014 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.

Sunday September 21st, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

On Hiring Developers

Laurie Voss, CTO at npm posted an interesting article on why many companies aren't able to hire good developers in spite of elaborate hiring and interviewing processes. It's a rather lengthy post but very much worth the read. The gist is this: Don't hire someone for what they know already, hire someone for potential and eagerness to grow. Hire people capable of both solving complex problems and communicating clearly. Last not least: Don't hire assholes. The author's own TL;DR is this: Many interview ...

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

Zen Design Principles

Following up on last week's post about Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind I came across an interesting article on Co.Design about 7 Design Principles, Inspired By Zen Wisdom. These principles build upon a concept called shibumi: To understand the Zen principles, a good starting point is shibumi. It is an overarching concept, an ideal. It has no precise definition in Japanese, but its meaning is reserved for objects and experiences that exhibit in paradox and all at once the very best of ...

Sunday September 7th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Recently, I heard designer Stephen Hay talk about the concept Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. The idea resonated with me. Now, I don't mean to delve into Buddhist teachings. I'm by no means an expert on that. What I'd like to broach is the more practical implications of this phrase - or at least one possible interpretation thereof. Maintaining a beginner's mind that's curious to learn, try and fail keeps you from getting into a rut. It means being open-minded, avoiding the well-trodden path. Such ...

Sunday August 31st, 2014 by Bjoern in Design

Deep Learning for NLP

Richard Socher, Chris Manning and Yoshua Bengio have created a tutorial on "Deep Learning for NLP (without Magic)". The tutorial includes slides and two videos of talks held on the subject. It deals with how deep learning algorithms can be applied in natural language processing. Deep learning is a set of algorithms and models which work under the assumption that observed data is generated from multiple layers of hidden representations that interact with each other. Although not really new and for some ...

Sunday August 24th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software

Leadership

Last week I was asked by a friend what I consider the most important aspects of leadership. Spontaneously, I came up with the following two: transparency dependability A good leader should always be open about her objectives and the team's goals. She's supposed to communicate timely and clearly - especially when it comes to bad news. A leader should also be dependable, i.e.: She should adhere to her decisions, admit when she's wrong and not act behind people's backs or have an agenda of ...

Sunday August 17th, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship

Atomic Design

Recently, I came across an interesting concept called Atomic Design. In a nutshell, Atomic Design favours systems of reusable components in lieu of monolithic pages. Now, don't get me wrong. This is nothing utterly new, of course. Style guides and brand guidelines always consisted of reusable and combinable components, fonts and colours. However, in traditional web design up to the mid-aughts designs used to be rather fixed, rigid and monolithic. It wasn't until relatively recently that due to the responsive design movement ...

Sunday August 10th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design

Automating Boilerplate Software Development

Recently, I've come across an interesting service called Prelang and an open source project named Rails Composer that both strive to do away with a lot of the common boilerplate coding that comes with the initial setup of web apps. Interestingly, both target Ruby on Rails, a framework that prides itself in its DRY and convention over configuration approach towards programming. Hence, one wouldn't exactly expect Rails developers to be affected by tedious boilerplate programming that much. By and large, this probably ...

Sunday August 3rd, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Bad Processes, Budgeting and Constraints

In a recent blog post Ben Horowitz talks about how one bad process can poison your company culture and break the company's back. The takeaway is this: Many startup founders - interestingly especially those with an engineering background - screw up the budgeting process by not applying any constraints to growth. According to Ben Horowitz a typical budgeting process goes like this: Set goals that will enable us to grow Break the goals down so that there is clear ownership and accountability for each goal by ...

Sunday July 27th, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Design, Entrepreneurship, Software

Erik Spiekermann on Type as Visual Language

At this year's beyond tellerrand design conference Erik Spiekermann talked about type as visible language. Erik Spiekermann is a design and typography legend. Having started his career in the early 1970s he's been a both prolific and seminal designer. He's worked for BVG, Deutsche Bahn, Düsseldorf Airport, Audi, Volkswagen and Heidelberg Printing. So, chances are you've already come across some of his works and you've most certainly seen one of the typefaces designed by him. Besides imparting lots of knowledge on type, typefaces ...

Sunday July 20th, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Design

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.