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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.

The Disappearing Computer: An Exclusive Preview of Humane’s Screenless Tech | Imran Chaudhri | TED

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Lösung für die COVID-19 Pandemie: Schnelltests als Zugangsberechtigung

Sorry, this entry is only available in German.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 ... Read more

Repost from 16 June 2020: COVID-19 Tracing App for Germany

Repost from 16 June 2020: German COVID-19 tracing app available now. Read more

German COVID-19 Tracing App Available Now

Earlier today, the highly anticipated COVID-19 tracing app for Germany, called Corona-Warn-App, has been released. The iOS version is available on the App Store. The Android version can be downloaded at Google Play. The Corona-Warn-App is based on the DP3T (Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing) architecture and the joint specification by Apple and Google for privacy-preserving exposure notification, which implements this architecture as an API for official public health providers to draw upon. The app is developed and published as open source under the Apache ... Read more

Debugging for Mobile Browsers

Occasionally, web developers need to debug a web app's behaviour in a specific browser on a specific device or class of devices. For desktop devices this usually isn't a problem because every modern browser nowadays provides a console, where application errors and custom console.log statements pile up. However, on mobile browsers there's usually no browser console, or browser development tools, for that matter. Analysing browser logs is still possible via vendors' development tools like Apple's Xcode, for example. Still, that process often ... Read more

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 ... Read more

Should Web Apps Behave More Like UNIX Programs?

Recently, through various discussions about the nature of the web and web applications I came up with an intriguing (to me at least ...) idea: Web apps should behave like UNIX command-line tools. Please hear me out and let me elaborate. Probably the most widespread pattern in modern web app development is that of single-page applications (SPAs). Though that particular term isn't used as abundantly anymore as it used to be a few years ago the design pattern it promoted still persists: Web apps ... Read more

Why motion matters in UI design

UI designer Craig Dehner wrote this interesting article about why he thinks motion design is the future. I wouldn't necessarily use such grandiose terms but essentially I agree: Motion design might not be THE future but it'll certainly play a vital role in current and future user interfaces. It took operating systems and browsers some time to be able to display smooth, seemingly natural animation (using CSS3 animations in the latter case). Now that animation is a staple of modern UI frameworks and ... Read more

Varying Degrees Of Software Quality And What To Do About It

When working on client projects I come across copious amounts of source code, which sometimes is very well-maintained, sometimes less so. The various code bases are as diverse as their owners and respective stakeholders: A few come with an inherent sense of quality, lots of unit tests serving as the specification for the product. They're typically delightful to maintain and extend. Some though at times leave the impression of having been cobbled together in a rather haphazard, impromptu manner in order to solve ... Read more

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 ... Read more
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