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.

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 ...

EstiMate – Accurate Crowdsourced Software Development Estimates

Following up on last week's post I've launched a product site / MVP for EstiMate: Software development effort estimation probably is one of the more difficult tasks in software development. Even the most experienced engineers' estimates are off, too every now and then. Being a somewhat disliked task far too often effort estimation is neglected or done in a rather haphazard way. EstiMate tries to solve this problem with a measurable and reliable method for effort estimation that's based on actual data ...

Sunday January 11th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Software

ZenQuery is now open source

Today I made ZenQuery available as open source (under the Apache License). ZenQuery is an 'Enterprise Backend as a Service' and allows you to easily access databases through a REST API without any programming knowledge required. Get SQL result sets as JSON, XML or CSV data, which can easily be processed by tools such as MS Excel or in your own applications. ZenQuery provides you with an instant REST API for your SQL queries. Anything that can be expressed by SELECT * FROM ...

Saturday December 20th, 2014 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Spucke, Klebeband und COBOL

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Kürzlich brauchte ich eine Kopie eines bestimmten Kontoauszuges für mein Geschäftskonto. Naiv nahm ich an, dass dies einfach per Online Banking zu erledigen wäre. Leider fehlt eine entsprechende Option im Online Banking System meiner Bank, also rief ich bei der Telefon Hotline an. Dort wollte man mir dann auch in der Tat direkt weiter helfen, benötigte aber das Endsaldo des vorherigen Auszugs, das Anfangssaldo des folgenden Auszugs und den Monat des Auszugs, von dem ich ...

Sunday June 22nd, 2014 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software

ZenQuery 1.0 is available today!

A few weeks ago I wrote about a new product I'm currently developing: ZenQuery, an Enterprise Backend as a Service. I’m pleased to announce the first public version of ZenQuery today. Since the first public announcement regarding ZenQuery roughly 30 days ago we’ve been busy working on this release. Today, you’ll be able to try out ZenQuery 1.0 yourselves on your own server and environment. I really hope you like what we’ve got for you so far. For more information please have a ...

Wednesday May 21st, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Web Applications

ZenQuery: From Idea To Product In 2 Weeks

Earlier this week I've launched a new product called ZenQuery. In a nutshell, ZenQuery is an application that creates an instant REST API (with JSON, XML and CSV formats) for SQL queries. This allows you to easily access any kind of data from your database without having to deal with technical details such as database drivers, connections, ORM or caching. A typical use case is an enterprise company which for example wants to create a new mobile application. The data needed for such ...

Sunday April 27th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Web Applications

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 ...

Sunday April 6th, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, 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

Natural Language User Interfaces And Internet Search

Recently, there was an article at Wired about IBM’s Watson and how IBM might be able to supersede Google as the dominant search engine by providing a question-answering kind of search engine. Every few years the idea of a natural language / semantic / question answering search engine crops up again. Indeed, natural language understanding is quite relevant for the crawling and indexing part of information retrieval systems and Google is very good at that. Just look at their quite formidable automatic translation ...

Sunday November 10th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Web Applications

i18n is a hard and largely unsolved problem

After last week's post about the intricacies of dealing with date and time representations in software I promised to write about another seemingly simple yet surprisingly complex area of software development: Internationalization. Some time ago a I wrote about an interesting presentation on i18n and localization in Rails by Heather Rivers of Yammer. If you're in any way dealing with internationalization (i18n) and localization (L10n) of software (which you basically should if you're into software development) have a look at the video of ...

Sunday June 30th, 2013 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.