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.

Enterprise UX: Huge Potential And Anything But Boring

Last year designer Uday Gajendar wrote this interesting post about why he designs enterprise UX suggesting more designers should follow suit. This is pretty much in the vein of another article by fellow designer Dave Malouf. I very much agree with this point of view. User experience in enterprise software generally has a huge potential for improvements that impact thousands of users in a meaningful way. Yes, enterprise software often isn't exactly nice to look at, cumbersome to use and generally not ...

Tracking Down Software Bugs, Automatically!

Last week MIT researchers published an article about an automatic bug-repair system called Prophet. Prophet is a machine-learning system that learns general properties and patterns of successful error corrections in software and applies those patterns to making new error corrections in other programs. While the possibility of having software track down and fix bugs automatically (which effectively would mean creating self-correcting computer programs) is exciting enough in its own right, Prophet possibly has far-reaching implications for verifying the general correctness of code ...

Sunday February 7th, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Software, Web Applications

Advice On Improving JavaScript Test Speed (by Shyp Engineering)

On their blog engineers of logistics service Shyp (defunct) talk about how they improved the turn-around times of their JavaScript test suite by an order of magnitude of 3 (i.e. 1000x), which is no small achievement. In a modern software development process continuous integration and continuous deployment play a vital role. These ensure that your software always is in an deliverable, tested state and ideally is deployed to production systems in a timely manner when a change has been made. This process ...

Sunday January 31st, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Internal, company-specific software frameworks are evil

OK, I'm exaggerating a little here, company-specific software frameworks aren't exactly evil as in the true definition of the word but who isn't fond of the occasional hyperbolic headline? What I'm trying get across is that most of the times, software frameworks developed within an organization specifically for solving that organization's business problems in a reusable, maintainable manner do more harm than good. Everybody who's been exposed to enterprise software development for longer than a very brief period has come across them in ...

Sunday January 24th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Software

Open-sourcing some of my project code: Freshcard and MemoEasy

Modern web development and software development in general for that matter wouldn't be possible without FOSS: free open source software. Whether it's web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, frontend frameworks like AngularJS or enterprise toolkits as for instance Spring, open source software is the solid foundation most modern software is built upon. It's quite likely the technology-fuelled growth we've seen for the last decades wouldn't have been possible if it hadn't been for open source software. So, while saying that open ...

Sunday October 4th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

ng-admin: Create admin panels from REST APIs

ng-admin is a helpful AngularJS UI component that automatically creates an admin user interface for RESTful APIs. Such a component is particularly useful for instance with back end applications in enterprise contexts because it allows you to quickly implement and iterate basic user interfaces based on your current model and its API.

Sunday July 5th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Web Applications

Modern SQL (with PostgreSQL)

SQL expert Markus Winand some time ago posted an insightful presentation on Modern SQL (mostly PostgreSQL-focussed) at SlideShare. The 116 slides contain plenty of modern SQL idioms you likely haven't used before. Even if you're an experienced SQL developer the presentation is still worth checking out.

Sunday June 28th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Everything you ever want to know about enterprise sales

This title sounds a bit like dirty secrets, doesn't it? When thinking of enterprise software sales most people think about arcane, lengthy, sometimes sleazy bureaucratic processes entailing: Vendors who are very secretive about pricing: If you have to ask for a price our product isn't for you! Lots of pointless meetings Obnoxious PowerPoint presentations A plethora of stakeholders A decision maker who won't be using the software product being bought and - of course - a user who doesn't have a say but has to use this ...

Sunday June 14th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship

JHipster: A Spring / AngularJS App Generator

You're a boring, hoary Java developer but secretly always wanted to belong to that hip JavaScript-Single-Page-Application crowd? Well, with JHipster now you can! On a more serious note, JHipster is a Yeoman generator that lets you bootstrap integrated Java (for the back-end server stuff) / AngularJS (for everything front-end and UI) web apps. JHipster makes use of proven technologies such as: Grunt Bower AngularJS Maven Spring Boot Spring Web MVC The project's goal is to provide the means for easily creating a beautiful state-of-the-art HTML5 / CSS3 / JavaScript ...

Sunday May 3rd, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Web Applications

FnordMetric and ChartSQL: Create Charts Directly From SQL

FnordMetric is an interesting new software package that allows you to create good-looking charts (in SVG format) directly from SQL using a query language called ChartSQL. The are quite a few examples available here. A typical ChartSQL query for a timeline series chart for instance looks like this: DRAW LINECHART WITH AXIS BOTTOM AXIS LEFT; SELECT 'data' AS series, FROM_TIMESTAMP(time) AS x, value2 * 1000 AS y FROM example_data WHERE series = "measurement2"; The software currently is ...

Sunday January 18th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.