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.

Surrounded By Idiots?

This week a video called 'The Expert' (based the short story "The Meeting" by Alexey Berezin) was spread by a CNET article aptly titled 'This is how an engineer feels when he's surrounded by idiots': I think most engineers can relate to this situation. However, the real question remains: Why do engineers time and time again find themselves in such Dilbertesque situations. Is it really because we're surrounded by idiots, nitwits and PHBs? Perhaps, but this is only a small part of the ...

Self Licking Ice Cream Cones

Chris Granger of LightTable fame has posted an insightful article on how better programming tools might come about. He argues that 'programming should be about solving problems' and that ideally 'programming is our way of encoding thought such that the computer can help us with it' but along the way we - as programmers - somehow lost these notions and in our daily work we predominantly deal with marginal problems, problems which are incidental to the problem we were trying to solve ...

Sunday March 30th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software

Telefondesinfizierer

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.»Ja, also schön«, nahm er den Faden wieder auf, »die Idee war, daß in das erste Raumschiff, die Arche A, all die genialen Führungspersönlichkeiten kommen sollten, die Wissenschaftler, die bedeutenden Künstler, verstehen Sie, die großen Macher; und ins dritte Schiff, die Arche C, kamen alle Leute, die die ganze Arbeit machen, die die Sachen tun und die Dinge machen; und schließlich in die Arche B - das sind wir - kamen alle übrigen: Filmproduzenten, Telefondesinfizierer, Frisöre, ...

Sunday March 23rd, 2014 by Bjoern in Business

Hemingway: Readibility Scores And Smart Suggestions On Style

Hemingway is an interesting new web app that not only assigns a score to the readability of your text but also makes smart suggestions regarding how to simplify your text in order to make it more understandable. Having worked on readability algorithms before I think this is a well-designed take on improving the usefulness of readability scores. Knowing that your text scores high or low in terms of readability only gets you so far. Hemingway additionally uses colour-coding to make suggestions such as: split ...

Sunday March 16th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software

Resources For SaaS Businesses And Enterprise App Developers

SaaS Club is a new website that keeps track of relevant resources for SaaS businesses and developers. These resources are organized both in categories such as 'product', 'metrics' and 'sales' and according to their target audience, e.g. 'developers & designers' or 'managers & product people'. Enterprise App Developer Atlas is an 'interactive map of the developer journey', i.e. it's a catalogue of tools for enterprise web app development. Tools are organized according to product phases and aspects such as API, testing, deployment ...

Sunday March 9th, 2014 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

Screw paper!

As a sort of follow-up to my post on bizarre, backward paper-based processes I recently doubled down on removing my remaining dependencies on paper and paper-based processes. With an reinvigorated passion for achieving "The Paperless Office ™" I did the following: scan all documents and invoices with PDFScanner (for macOS) store all scanned documents in Evernote sign documents with DocuSign have Zapier automatically store all invoices that arrived digitally via eMail in Evernote as well rigorously throw away everything that doesn't need to be stored for ...

Sunday March 2nd, 2014 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Software, Web, Web Applications

Life, The Universe And Everything

The Egg - a short story by Andy Weir - provides an intriguing perspective on cosmology (that as someone told me more or less corresponds to Kashmir Shaivism) I'm not sure if the Buddhist term kōan technically applies here but this certainly is a tale made to both confuse and delight. As stories that question your world view go, another interesting one is The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. A bit longer but also very much worth the read.

Sunday February 23rd, 2014 by Bjoern in Ideas

Paper

Recently, I registered for Flinkster - a car sharing service operated by Deutsche Bahn. At first, I was pleasantly surprised at their rather straightforward online registration process. Little did I know then that their registration process also involved handing in a printed and signed document for confirmation of identity. Turns out I was in for a Kafkaesque farce of a process. Not only was I required to also hand in my passport and driving licence for identity verification, which could easily have ...

Sunday February 16th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship

Leaving your comfort zone

Leave your comfort zone is an oft-heard piece of advice on how to grow personally and generally get better at doing whatever is relevant to you. If you only ever stick to things you already know you deny yourself the opportunity to learn and experience something new. Why is leaving your comfort zone so hard then? Well, it should be. Doing something you're uncomfortable with initially means that the likely outcome is failure and failure is embarrassing. Sure, failure is an opportunity ...

Sunday February 9th, 2014 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship

Houdini – Automatically Generated Web App Tests

Houdini is was a new SaaS product - currently in private beta - that "watches you using your site and automatically generates end to end tests that run continuously in the cloud". After having added some JavaScript code to your web app Houdini will follow and record your clicks, inputs and actions. These recordings are then used for automatically generating tests that run continuously. So, if a code change breaks your app's front end behaviour you will be informed about this. This is ...

Sunday February 2nd, 2014 by Bjoern in Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.