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.

Dropdown menus and alternative approaches for selecting from a choice of options

In this post designer Luke Wroblewski outlines why dropdowns should be the UI of last resort. The problem with dropdown menus - also known as select boxes in HTML lingo - is that they're something of a general purpose, one-size-fits all solution for dealing with lists of elements. Although dropdown menus accommodate most list-based use cases using them often doesn't take the specifics of the use case at hand into consideration. As pointed out by Luke most of the times other, more ...

Sharing and exploring data models and database patterns

Somewhat in the vein of last week's post, I'd like to share a new service called dbpatterns with you. dbpatterns allows you to create ER models in the browser and share them with other users. If a particular pattern or model suits your needs you can directly export its DDL for PostgreSQL, SQLite, MySQL or Oracle RDBMS. I really appreciate the idea of promoting and sharing best practices for database systems. While object-oriented software design patterns are rather common (though some particular ...

Sunday April 17th, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Hands-on SQL Tips: Sentinels And Window Functions

Sometimes when displaying data in an application you want the amount of data (rows, individual data points etc.) to be limited for the app to stay responsive and to allow the user to more easily scan and browse the data set. In SQL this is commonly done using a LIMIT statement: [crayon-698fbdf8a6f85719925260/] Now, what if you want to not only display the data but also inform the user in case the total number of rows in the table exceeds the limit set by ...

Sunday April 10th, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Accounting in 2016 – Still a manual and tedious process

The past few weeks I've been struggling with automating my accounting, invoicing and banking processes to the point I don't really have to think about it anymore. Currently, a lot of my accounting-related processes are still way too manual for my liking. Being both a virtuous, lazy programmer and an entrepreneur I'd like to automate every process that can be automated at reasonable cost, especially if that process doesn't generate any revenue. Now, as far as invoicing and small business accounting is ...

Sunday April 3rd, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Software

So sollten Freelancer ihre Preise wirklich kalkulieren

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Vor kurzem machte ein Artikel auf dem Startup Blog Gründerszene die Runde, der behauptet: „So sollten Freelancer ihr Gehalt berechnen“. Darin geht es um den Preis, den Freiberufler in der IT Branche für ihre Leistungen verlangen können. Autor dieses Gastartikels ist Thomas Jajeh, Gründer und Geschäftsführer der Projekt-Vermittlungsplattform Twago. Eigentlich sollte man also meinen, dass hier ein Branchenkenner eine fundierte Analyse und sinnvolle Tipps für Freiberufler liefert. Allerdings verspricht bereits der Titel nichts Gutes. Die ...

Sunday March 27th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship, Software

UI Design Patterns

UI Patterns is an extensive library of user interface design patterns by Danish web developer Anders Toxboe. This website is a collection of tried-and-tested best practices in UI design. Although the site focusses on web applications and websites most of its practices apply to user-facing software in general. Best practices and design patterns allow us to draw upon proven methods - of user interaction in this case - instead of having to re-invent the wheel (which itself is an anti-pattern) each ...

Sunday March 20th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web Applications

LOAD”*”,8,1

Last week, I met with a few friends for an evening of 80s retro computing - or retro gaming to be specific. We set up an Amiga 500 and a C64 and played classic games like Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, Dynablaster, Sensible Soccer, California Games and International Karate. It was great fun. Retro gaming of course is a lot about nostalgia but there's also something about many of these games that hasn't been achieved in many modern video games anymore: Instead of ...

Sunday March 13th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web

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 ...

Sunday March 6th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Software, Web Applications

CoderDojo: Free Programming Clubs For Young People

At last year's Web Summit in Dublin I came across CoderDojo, a community that organizes free programming clubs for young people. Originally founded in Cork by entrepreneurs James Whelton and Bill Liao, CoderDojo is a volunteer-led 'grass roots'-type organization that promotes teaching programming to young people in order to support kids by giving them valuable skills that allow them to create stuff such as useful tools, products and art. At the same time efforts like this help tackle the shortage of people ...

Sunday February 28th, 2016 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Software, Web

Analyzing Large Datasets With SQL

As part of a web application I've created for a client, I've been working on efficient analysis of somewhat large datasets for some time now. This analysis often involves complexing grouping, clustering and value aggregation. SQL and PostgreSQL aggregate functions in particular come in quite handy when dealing with that kind of challenge. While RDBMS and SQL certainly are useful already just for keeping and retrieving data, i.e. for running your usual CRUD operation, those tools really shine when it comes to ...

Sunday February 21st, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.