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.

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 ...

About the Pitfalls Of Software Development Effort Estimation

Software development effort estimation probably is one of the most disliked, even feared tasks in software development and computer science in general. However crucial, even the most experienced engineers succumb to common pitfalls from time to time or their estimates are off, too every now and then. This is an especially striking phenomenon because software development effort estimation actually is a well-researched subject that a plethora has been written about. Starting in the 1950s IBM did a tremendous amount of research on ...

Sunday January 4th, 2015 by Bjoern in Business, Software

FormatJS: Localize dates and numbers

Internationalization and localization still is a somewhat difficult problem in software development. FormatJS is a collection of JavaScript libraries that addresses a part of this problem by formatting dates and numbers according to a selected locale. It makes clever use of pluralization and natural language patterns so the output strings read like a natural language utterance instead of a computer-generated string, for example it generates these outputs for 0, 1 and 1,000 items, respectively: "Annie took no photos on December 14, 2014." "Annie took ...

Sunday December 28th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

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

Monetizing Open Source Software Is Still Hard

Some weeks ago the guys behind LocomotiveCMS - an open source CMS that's competing with Wordpress - published a sobering article on how they failed making a profit with open source software so far. Their model basically relies on building reputation from their open source work and benefit from community contributions to their software. Their revenue is generated from both doing consulting for LocomotiveCMS and selling hosting services in a SaaS package. Not too unusual a model. The harsh reality - however - ...

Sunday December 14th, 2014 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Software

The Future of Software

In an article titled Programming: easier, better, faster, stronger. Giuliano Iacobelli of Stamplay writes about how programming might become easier, faster and more reliable in the future while decoupling creation of business logic from the need to write actual code. It's an important subject I've written about time and time again: How do we make programming more observable and more responsive? How do we allow more people to turn ideas and business processes into software? As Chris Dixon puts it: Software not only ...

Sunday December 7th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web

Apple, Google, Microsoft – What do they do best?

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently made some interesting points about what he thinks are the core strengths of Microsoft and its competitors Apple and Google. Though I can't really say I particularly like Microsoft products or would use them as a platform or tools for my own products there's some truth to these statements: "Whereas in our case our identity really is about empowering others to build products." "[ ... ] we want to be the tools provider, the platform provider [ ... ]" Google, ...

Sunday November 23rd, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Mobile Applications, Software, Web, Web Applications

Airtable – A true spreadsheet / database hybrid?

Lots of the software of the world is written in Microsoft's Excel. A spreadsheet environment lends itself particularly well to addressing everyday computing problems. Compiling tabular data, creating connections between particular pieces of that data, condensing and aggregating over a dataset's values. These are common tasks a spreadsheet solves very well with no need for complex database or application server software. A spreadsheet is a flexible tool that provides simple, responsive and instant feedback to data input and algorithm changes. However flexible, ...

Sunday November 9th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Impulse – Dynamic Physics Animations For The Mobile Web

Impulse is a promising new JavaScript animation framework for mobile websites. The animations generated with Impulse look very smooth and natural. Very impressive work. Go check out the examples page for a first glimpse.

Sunday October 26th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

Stephen Hay – Maintaining Simplicity

Here's another interesting video of the beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2014 design conference. This is Stephen Hay talking about Maintaining Simplicity: Stephen Hay – Maintaining Simplicity – beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2014 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.

Sunday October 19th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.