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.

Developing with Apache Wicket

I've been working with Apache Wicket on a rather complex client project for quite some time now and I'd like to share my experience. Apache Wicket is a component-based web app framework for Java. In contrast to MVC frameworks such as Rails (or Play and Grails in the Java world), which map requests to controller actions and views, Wicket is more similar to stateful GUI frameworks like Swing. Wicket applications are made up of trees of components. Each Wicket page is a root ...

Piraten auf Abwegen?

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Nach dem rasanten Aufstieg der Piratenpartei - die Partei trat in Deutschland immerhin erst 2006 überhaupt zu Wahlen an und war 2012 bereits in 4 Landes- und etlichen Kommunalparlamenten vertreten - folgte im Laufe des letzten Jahres ein noch rasanterer Absturz, der seinen vorläufigen Tiefpunkt im Ergebnis bei der Wahl zum niedersächsischen Landtag fand. Die schnelle und deutliche Erfolg der Piratenpartei liegt meiner Meinung nach darin begründet, dass alle im Bundestag vertretenen Parteien die Themen ...

Saturday January 26th, 2013 by Bjoern in Ideas

Live Tools For Building Website Elements

Ui Parade have released a series of design tools that allow you to have common website elements generated in HTML / CSS: http://livetools.uiparade.com These tools include: Button Builder Form Builder Icon Bulder Ribbon Builder Have a look at Ui Parade's actual website, too. It lists quite a bunch of useful and inspiring design elements.

Sunday January 20th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Web Applications

Regexper: Visualize Regular Expressions

Regexper is a new visualization tool that renders regular expressions as the equivalent finite-state machines. Very cool stuff, give it a try.

Sunday January 13th, 2013 by Bjoern in Software

WordPress Child Themes

A few days ago I read a very useful tip regarding customizing WordPress themes and why you should use child themes for that. In short, child themes allow you to extend and customize existing WordPress themes without compromising the ability to update the original theme. If instead you directly customized a theme your changes would be lost once you install an update (or have that update installed automatically).

Sunday January 6th, 2013 by Bjoern in Web, Web Applications

The 4 Hour Workweek – Revisited

Some time ago I read Tim Ferris' seminal book 'The 4-Hour Workweek'. It's a bold take at lifestyle design that challenges common misconceptions about what work actually means and how we should live our lives. In this book Ferriss outlines four main steps for an independent, self-determined life: Definition: Self-awareness. What do you truly want in life? What are your real goals? Do you really want to work till you drop in order to become rich just to live up to society's expectations? Elimination: ...

Sunday December 30th, 2012 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship, Ideas

Collaborating with GitHub and Dropbox

Git and GitHub are awesome tools for developers. Version control systems have been used for quite some time and for good reasons. Git, its distributed approach and GitHub's social coding features like pull requests for instance have introduced a whole new dimension to collaborative software development. However, when working with non-coders (e.g. graphic designers) on projects using Git for managing source files like CSS and JavaScript assets that have to be touched by both developers and web designers can prove to be ...

Sunday December 23rd, 2012 by Bjoern in Software

Automatic Updates for WordPress

I'd like to introduce you (or rather the WordPress users amongst you) to one of the lesser known gems for WordPress - the Automatic Updater plugin. This plugin automatically updates your WordPress core installation as well as installed plugins and themes, which is a boon, especially if you have to maintain several WordPress installations.

Thursday December 20th, 2012 by Bjoern in Web, Web Applications

Numbers: A Mathematics Toolkit For node.js / JavaScript

Numbers is an advanced mathematics toolkit for JavaScript and Node.js developed by Steve Kaliski, @sjkaliski: Numbers provides a comprehensive set of mathematical tools that currently are not offered in JavaScript. These tools include: Basic calculations Calculus Matrix Operations Prime Numbers Statistics Very interesting stuff.

Tuesday December 18th, 2012 by Bjoern in Web Applications

Bauhaus and Web Design

The other day I've read this somewhat older yet still relevant article by Simon Collision: Bauhaus Ideology and the Future of Web Design. In a stream of thought kind of way it deals with the main tenets of the Bauhaus school of thought and how those relate to modern and future web design. It draws upon Bauhaus ideas such as "form follows function", simplicity and the unification of art, craft, and technology - most of which seem oddly familiar in the context ...

Sunday December 16th, 2012 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.