Software | Björn Wilmsmann

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.

Less Is More

What's true for design in general certainly is true for software design in particular: Less is more - or paraphrasing Dieter Rams - "Write less software in order to write better software." A few weeks ago I read this interesting article by web accessibility consultant Heydon Pickering. In this blog post he argues that the only foolproof way of writing performant web applications is to write less code. Sure, all that fancy minification, transpiling, JIT / AoT compilation and optimisation stuff might ...

Explorable Explanations And A Reactive Document IDE

It's no secret I'm a fan of Bret Victor's work and the notion that programming tools should interact with coding and provide immediate, responsive feedback to changes. Recently, I've come across two intriguing projects / products that both draw upon this idea: Carbide (currently available as an early alpha version) is a new kind of JavaScript IDE that both immediately visualises the result of code changes and allows you to manipulate and visually interact with your code using UI controls such as sliders. Explorable ...

Sunday September 25th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web

Daily Standup Meetings: Anti-patterns And What to Do About Them

Daily standup meetings are a mainstay of agile software development methods, such as XP, Kanban (which used to be an inventory control system having originated at Toyota) and Scrum, of course. Given that agile development methods are by far the most dominant ones in the software industry today, it should come as no surprise that daily standup meetings are a common feature of software development processes these days. These meetings basically serve the purpose of informing everyone on the team about these 3 ...

Sunday September 18th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Software

Reasons to: 2016 – Opening Titles by Mike Brondbjerg

This week I was in the wonderful seaside city of Brighton for the Reasons to: 2016 conference. While I haven't yet had the time for a proper write-up of the event, the amazing opening titles by Mike Brondbjerg are already available: Reasons to: 2016 - Opening Titles - Mike Brondbjerg from Reasons to on Vimeo. The entire visuals are generated by code and react to the music! With Jared Tarbell and Joshua Davis as two of the speakers, generative art, data visualization and ...

Sunday September 11th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Code means communication

Writing software is all about communication. Code is a way of conveying the meaning of natural language requirements in an exact manner so that computers can make sense of the intentions of our fickle human minds and the often ambiguous ways we tend to express ourselves in. So, in that respect software development amounts to translating human concepts and notions into a language machines can understand. However, communicating with machines is only one, more technical aspect, of writing software. The by far more important ...

Sunday August 21st, 2016 by Bjoern in Software

William Hertling – Kill Process

I've recently finished listening to the audio version of William Hertling's latest novel "Kill Process" I think it's fair to say that I'm quite a fan of his novels and his writing. Kill Process is a bit of a departure from Hertling's Singularity series in that it doesn't deal with future events and science fiction technology but mostly takes place in the present day with a few exceptions for flashbacks to previous events in the protagonist's life. The novel has been described as ...

Sunday August 14th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Ideas, Software, Web

Cracking the Code – David Jonathan Ross

At this year's beyond tellerrand typeface designer David Jonathan Ross gave an interesting talk about the typography of programming, including its history and the design rationale behind monospace fonts, in his own words hitting the sweet spot that is the nerd trifecta of history, programming and fonts: Cracking the Code - David Jonathan Ross - btconfDUS 2016 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. The talk contains a lot of intriguing insights into why programming fonts are designed the way they are, what UX ...

Sunday July 24th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Christopher Murphy: Time + Creativity

In this beyond tellerrand talk designer Christopher Murphy emphasizes the importance of procrastination and reserving time for experimentation and endeavours not directly related to a specific goal at hand: Time + Creativity - Christopher Murphy - btconfDUS 2016 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. While procrastination usually is seen as something negative - and in most cases rightfully so - setting aside time for a free flow of thoughts and ideas that's not immediately purpose-driven is an essential part of any creative process ...

Sunday July 17th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Big O Notation: Less Scary Than You Might Think

As a software developer chances are that at some time in your professional life you'll come across a mathematical concept called Big O notation. Now, if you happen to not have a traditional university computer science / maths background, you might have a bit of a hard time grasping the common - usually strictly mathematical - explanations of Big O notation. Big O notation is tremendously useful for reasoning about performance and memory consumption of algorithms. Depending on the exact nature of ...

Sunday June 26th, 2016 by Bjoern in Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.