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.

I see numbers

Metaphors play a vital role in how human beings make sense of the world. The ways in which we view and describe both the world around us and abstract thoughts often are inherently metaphorical. When relating to time, for example, we often use spatial metaphors such as "to look forward to", "time moving forward", or "to turn back time". For some though, relating to time in terms of spatial concepts and relations can take on quite a literal meaning. I've always visualised numbers, ...

Harry Roberts – Get Your “head” Straight @ beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2021

At this year's Düsseldorf edition of beyond tellerrand, Web Performance Consultant Harry Roberts gave this insightful talk on how to design and craft the oft-overlooked (no pun intended ...) HTML <head> element's content in terms of performance: Harry Roberts - Get Your "head" Straight - beyond tellerrand Düseldorf 2021 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.

Sunday December 12th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Web, Web Applications

Welcome Back: beyond tellerrand Opening Titles Düsseldorf 2021

Last week, I was at the 2021 Düsseldorf edition of beyond tellerrand. As most on-site events during the last two years, beyond tellerrand had been postponed until, earlier this year, they got the go-ahead that the event was finally allowed to take place again. In spite of the rather short time to prepare, Marc and his team once again put on a fantastic event. These beautiful opening titles celebrate the event's return to the limelight with the simple, but very appropriate, words "Welcome ...

Sunday November 21st, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Web

User Experience Design Methods & Deliverables

As I previously wrote about, design and user experience (UX) design are disciplines defined and governed by rules, principles, and constraints. The highly recommended Laws of UX provides an in-depth overview of principles and best practices in UX design. Coming from a slightly more hands-on perspective, designer Fabricio Teixeira compiled a comprehensive list of UX design methods & deliverables such as service blueprints, personas, or user journeys.

Sunday July 25th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design

A Collection of for a Improving the UX of Signup and Login Workflows

Independent UX designer Erik D. Kennedy recently published an article with 15 Tips for Better Signup / Login UX on Learn UI Design - a website through which he provides acclaimed courses on both UI and UX design. The article lists general suggestions such as autofocusing on the first field (i.e. the username, or rather: email, field), immediately validating form values, or making input labels clickable, as well as more specific - but no less expedient - ones like making password requirements explicit to ...

Sunday July 11th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Second-order Affordances: Design & Quantum Superposition

A few years ago, having read a thought-provoking article by Csongor Bartus I wrote about design & quantum superposition. The main idea behind this article, and my interpretation, is that - similar to a particle, which exists in a state of quantum superposition - a design doesn't exist by itself but can only ever be realised in a given context and at a specific moment through observation by a user and possibly a device that design is observed with. The gist, ...

Sunday June 27th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web, Web Applications

Beautiful Presentation of Code Snippets

In case you need to document and present source code and would like to do so in a visually appealing manner these tools might come in handy: Ray.so Carbon Source Code Shots With Ray.so being the most recent one and arguably also the one with the most stylish output, all of those generate decent-looking images of your source code snippets for embedding into documentation, blog posts, or eBooks, for example.

Sunday March 14th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Lösung für die COVID-19 Pandemie: Schnelltests als Zugangsberechtigung

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Contrary to my usual writing habits the remainder of this post will be in German. The reason for this is that although the subject most certainly is of interest to everyone the specifics of the solution outlined in the following mostly apply to the current COVID-19 situation in Germany and my personal experience with that situation. The article therefore is mostly relevant to a German audience. If you're interested in discussing the potential for ...

Thursday February 18th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Software, Web Applications

Five Articles on Software Quality and Design Patterns

This week I'd like to point you to five articles I previously posted on this blog and from which I think that they're as relevant as they were at the time. The first three are about general software design principles, software architecture and software quality while the final two refer to specific best practices and common design patterns for Angular: Writing Disposable Code, Not Reusable Code (November 06, 2016) What Causes Over-engineering and How Can You Prevent It? (April 16, 2017) Less Is More ...

Sunday January 24th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Latency by The Radiophonic Workshop

On the 22nd of November, the electronic music pioneers of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop (of "Doctor Who" theme music fame, amongst others) performed a unique piece of music called 'Latency', in which they make clever use of network latency to create a musical loop. Each of the musicians involved sequentially played his part in a loop. The result then was sent via the Internet to the next musician at another location, who in turn built upon what had been played until ...

Sunday December 13th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design, Music, Web

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.