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.

Remote Team Collaboration: Interactive Presentations With Mentimeter

Continuing on my recent theme of remote team collaboration tools, today I'd like to suggest Mentimeter. Mentimeter is an interactive online presentation tool that allows you to engage with and gather feedback from meeting attendees, workshop participants, or team mates. Where with ordinary presentation tools your captive audience can just watch and listen, Mentimenter enables event organisers to collect feedback, keep everyone engaged, and make sure everyone's voice is heard. In addition to the ordinary content slides one would expect from presentation software, ...

Remote Team Collaboration: Presentify

In the last two weeks I wrote about Zappy and Loom - tools that help you with sharing information, documenting work and collaborating visually in remote or distributed work settings. Continuing with this general theme, today I'd like to suggest another, similar tool: Presentify (Mac App Store) is macOS menu bar app that allows you to annotate any screen or highlight your cursor, no matter the context or app you're in. This makes Presentify a general-purpose presentation and teaching tool that's ...

Sunday May 24th, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software

Remote Team Collaboration: Loom – Screen & Video Recording Software

Last week I wrote about Zappy by Zapier, a tool for visually documenting and sharing your work and your underlying processes. Loom is a similar tool that - by going beyond mere screenshots with actual screen recordings - allows your team to collaborate remotely and asynchronously. From explaining and reviewing code to design critiques, customer support, sales, and employee feedback there are a variety of use cases such a tool can you help you with when it comes to efficiently organising distributed work ...

Sunday May 17th, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software

Remote Team Collaboration: Communicate via Annotated Screenshots with Zappy for macOS

Zapier is a workflow automation software I'm using extensively and which I can highly recommend. Zapier is fully distributed remote company. In order to simplify collaborating visually while working remotely they have been using a tool called "Zappy for macOS" for some time now and they've recently released it for others to use as well. Zappy allows you to quickly capture, annotate, and share screenshots with your co-workers. In their own words, Zappy is: The fastest, all-in-one way to share screenshots, GIFs, and recordings with ...

Sunday May 10th, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software

GDPR Transparency: Web App for Managing GDPR-related Activities in Your Company

GDPR Transparency is a web app for managing the record of processing activities (see https://gdpr-info.eu/art-30-gdpr/) and technical and organisational measures (seehttps://gdpr-info.eu/art-32-gdpr/) as required by GDPR. Since I didn't feel comfortable with the common - rather makeshift - solution of managing GDPR-related processing activities (see https://gdpr-info.eu/art-30-gdpr/) in a spreadsheet table I've created this web app called GDPR Transparency that allows you to manage that kind of information for your business: https://bjoernkw.github.io/gdpr-transparency/ The source code is available here: https://github.com/BjoernKW/gdpr-transparency GDPR Transparency is a PWA based on Angular ...

Sunday April 19th, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Reprise: Petro Salema – Storyteller Extraordinaire

Almost five years ago I wrote about a talk given by Petro Salema at that year's edition of beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf: Petro Salema – Designing Interfaces That Think @ beyond tellerrand Düssedorf 2015 A common advice given regarding talks and presentations, especially ones of a more technical variety, is to not just talk about technical details but to tell a story. While this piece of advice is good and well-intentioned it's not usually exemplified or specified in any more detail. Steve Jobs is ...

Sunday April 12th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Software, Web, Web Applications

Konrad Zuse: Not the most correct but the least complicated theories find practical application.

Not the most correct but the least complicated theories find practical application. - Konrad Zuse A translated quote from one of the inventors of computers and modern computer science I read last year under a bust of Zuse near Kleiner Tiergarten in Berlin this statement is more relevant today than ever. In software development in particular we often attempt to design solutions that cover each and every possible use case - however unlikely or even virtually non-existent that use case might be. ...

Sunday February 2nd, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Software

Remote Work Is Here to Stay: Best Practices and Tools

2019 seems to have been the year when remote work finally caught on. While not exactly the new default yet it's not as alien and outré anymore as it used to be just a few years ago. Today, instead of being ridiculed or looking into bewildered faces proponents of remote work are usually taken seriously. You're also far less likely to hear bromides such as "Yeah, we don't do that here because in-person communication is easier." (a claim often made but ...

Sunday January 26th, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship, Software

Boring Solutions Revisited: Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley

Dan McKinley's article on choosing boring solutions, although not exactly new anymore, has been a welcome reminder for me to revisit the topic of of using boring solutions and keeping things simple. Dan makes the point that "adding technology to your company comes with a cost" or as I stated in my own article on this subject: "The elephant in the room is: There’s an opportunity cost to everything." Most choices come with a trade-off. If you decide to use a technology for the ...

Sunday October 13th, 2019 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Software

Stephen Fluin @ ng-conf 2018: Angular for Designers

At ng-conf 2018 Google Angular developer advocate Stephen Fluin gave this highly interesting talk on making Angular - and web development in general, for that matter - more accessible to designers: Sadly, what we often see in software development industry today is largely artificial boundaries being set up between roles that define themselves by the programming languages they use, e.g. front-end development vs back-end. In other words: Paradoxically, additional information silos are created, while software is actually meant to tear down information ...

Sunday April 21st, 2019 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.