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.

Hackers – Between camp and weird classic

Recently, I watched the film Hackers again. It's a weird, fast-paced jumble of tech paranoia, Camp, techno-babble, a contrived hacker youth sub-culture that - perhaps sadly so - neither existed at that time nor ever came to be. It's very much a 90s film with its colourful clothing, the techno music and the general premise that technology is going to change everything. The Web was in its first early boom phase and the people involved already felt that it would have ...

Chris Heilmann @ Fronteers 2015: Of Gaps, Fillers and Empty Spaces

At the Fronteers Conference in Amsterdam in October 2015 developer / evangelist Chris Heilmann gave a talk about our desire as web developers to innovate ever faster, mostly motivated by our feeling that - despite the drive to implement an ever increasing number of software products as web applications - browsers and the web as a platform can't yet compete with native platforms (specifically mobile ones) in many respects, to which belong for example: UI responsiveness, native look-and-feel and simple use ...

Sunday January 3rd, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Front End Development, Software, Web, Web Applications

Remy Sharp @ Fronteers 2015: The Art of Debugging

At the Fronteers Conference in Amsterdam in October JavaScript specialist Remy Sharp talked about "The Art of Debugging" or rather his debugging workflow and useful best practices and approaches for debugging JavaScript and HTML5 apps. The talk contains lots of useful information on this complex subject. So, if you're developing JavaScript applications this presentation is very much worth watching: Remy Sharp - The Art of Debugging from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Sunday December 27th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software

Zoltan Kollin: Misused mobile UX patterns

Zoltan Kollin, UX designer, co-organizer of the Amuse UX Conference and co-author of UX Myths (another highly recommendable collection of user experience tips and guidelines) recently wrote a post about misused mobile UX patterns. We've seen it all on the mobile platform of our choice: icons whose meaning is hard to guess the dreaded hamburger menu and hidden screens inconsistent gestures and features that are hidden behind them Zoltan mentions those and a few more bad practices, explains why they're bad and gives examples of better ...

Sunday December 20th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

Primate: Walking the tightrope between mediocrity and bankruptcy

In October I was at this year's Fronteers conference in Amsterdam. Fronteers is a front-end developers association that organises local events throughout the year but is most well-known for this - compared to others - small (around 500 visitors) but all the more exciting conference. The event sports a familiar atmosphere and a broad range of first-class speakers presenting about all sorts of front-end web development-related topics. The videos of this year's talks are now online. A particularly interesting talk was the ...

Sunday December 13th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Front End Development, Web

Arbeitnehmerüberlassung? Nein, danke!

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Der Markt für Aufträge für IT Berater wird ganz wesentlich von so genannten Vermittlern dominiert - Unternehmen, die als Mittelsmänner zwischen Dienstleistern und Kunden fungieren. Die Gründe dafür sind vielfältig, haben unter anderem mit dem deutschen Gesetz zur "Scheinselbständigkeit", aber auch mit der unzureichenden Positionierung vieler IT Freiberufler am Markt zu tun. In letzter Zeit häufen sich kuriose Auftragsanfragen einiger dieser Vermittler: In der Projekt-Ausschreibung wird zunächst eindeutig nach Freiberuflern gesucht. Kommt es dann im ...

Sunday December 6th, 2015 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship, Software

Web Summit 2015 in Dublin

A few weeks ago I've been to beautiful, vibrant Dublin for this year's Web Summit. Web Summit - self-proclaimed (and from what I've seen and experienced quite rightfully so) "world’s greatest tech fest" - is a 3-day event packed to the brim with a huge variety of talks and presentations on different tracks such as Design Summit, Enterprise Summit and Health Summit. Besides, there's a vast number of startups both pitching on a fewer smaller stages and presenting their respective products ...

Sunday November 29th, 2015 by Bjoern in Business, Software, Web

spaCy – A fast natural language processing library

spaCy is a rather new library (written in Python and Cython) for performing various NLP-related tasks such as tokenization, POS-tagging and syntactic parsing. The authors claim it's faster (in some cases a lot faster) than other common solutions such as NLTK or Stanford's CoreNLP and peer reviews seem to corroborate these claims. spaCy is English-only for now. If you're working on performance-intensive NLP tasks and if that's no deal-breaker for you might want to check it out. The source code is available ...

Sunday November 22nd, 2015 by Bjoern in Software

Rachel Nabors: Animating the User Experience

In this talk interaction developer and cartoonist Rachel Nabors explains the six components of motion design and how to apply those in order not to make your UI just flashy (or should I say "gaudy"?) but to actually create a better user experience and make use of animation to support your website's or application's intent:

Sunday November 1st, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web

Stephanie Rieger – The Emerging Global Web

In this presentation Stephanie Rieger talks about how the web is accessed and used in emerging economies in Africa and Asia and why mobile plays a dominant role in developing countries: Stephanie Rieger – The Emerging Global Web – beyond tellerrand DÜSSELDORF 2015 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. From a developed economy point of view this is very intriguing. Though mobile devices already dominate the market in developed economies and mobile-first is the dominant design approach for new websites and apps in ...

Sunday October 25th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Web, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.