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.

Dave Shea: A Brief History of Web Design

At beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2015 David Shea, creator of the seminal website CSS Zen Garden gave a talk about the history of web design. David Shea takes us back on a - somewhat nostalgic - journey 25 years back to remind us about nigh forgotten websites and services (does anybody still remember Hotmail and GeoCities?). There are lessons to be learned from those early incarnations of web design and mistakes to be avoided. Moreover, and quite interestingly many concepts and techniques we ...

Petro Salema – Designing Interfaces That Think @ beyond tellerrand Düssedorf 2015

Earlier this year at beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2015 I had the privilege to attend a talk by Petro Salema. Petro shared his insights about today's limits in human computer interaction, attention span, mental bandwidth and how to address these issues. While the subject matter itself is interesting enough already I've never personally witnessed such rivetting storytelling before. He started his talk with a captivating story from his home country Tanzania about Bwakila, a machete-wielding madmen. This story nicely set the ground for the ...

Sunday August 16th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Software, Web, Web Applications

ng-admin: Create admin panels from REST APIs

ng-admin is a helpful AngularJS UI component that automatically creates an admin user interface for RESTful APIs. Such a component is particularly useful for instance with back end applications in enterprise contexts because it allows you to quickly implement and iterate basic user interfaces based on your current model and its API.

Sunday July 5th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Web Applications

Modern SQL (with PostgreSQL)

SQL expert Markus Winand some time ago posted an insightful presentation on Modern SQL (mostly PostgreSQL-focussed) at SlideShare. The 116 slides contain plenty of modern SQL idioms you likely haven't used before. Even if you're an experienced SQL developer the presentation is still worth checking out.

Sunday June 28th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Everything you ever want to know about enterprise sales

This title sounds a bit like dirty secrets, doesn't it? When thinking of enterprise software sales most people think about arcane, lengthy, sometimes sleazy bureaucratic processes entailing: Vendors who are very secretive about pricing: If you have to ask for a price our product isn't for you! Lots of pointless meetings Obnoxious PowerPoint presentations A plethora of stakeholders A decision maker who won't be using the software product being bought and - of course - a user who doesn't have a say but has to use this ...

Sunday June 14th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship

UX Time: Responsive Tables and Smoothly Scrolling Through Large Datasets

Today I'd like to introduce two nifty and very useful tools and techniques for better visualizing tabular data on the Web: Responsive Tables in Pure CSS: This technique (code available here) makes clever use of :before and :after pseudo elements in order to nicely display responsive HTML tables on mobile devices (or any device with a smaller screen size for that matter) without any changes to the HTML code or having to resort to JavaScript. Clusterize.js, a JavaScript plugin that allows you to ...

Sunday May 17th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

JHipster: A Spring / AngularJS App Generator

You're a boring, hoary Java developer but secretly always wanted to belong to that hip JavaScript-Single-Page-Application crowd? Well, with JHipster now you can! On a more serious note, JHipster is a Yeoman generator that lets you bootstrap integrated Java (for the back-end server stuff) / AngularJS (for everything front-end and UI) web apps. JHipster makes use of proven technologies such as: Grunt Bower AngularJS Maven Spring Boot Spring Web MVC The project's goal is to provide the means for easily creating a beautiful state-of-the-art HTML5 / CSS3 / JavaScript ...

Sunday May 3rd, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Web Applications

Some Free Design Resources

Pexels (a free stock photo site) have published a small but useful list of free design resources on their blog. From typography, icons and colour palettes to free design tools such as GIMP or Inkscape, the list is far from comprehensive but contains helpful stuff nevertheless.

Sunday April 26th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development

SheetJS – Parse And Manipulate Excel Spreadsheets In The Browser

SheetJS (source code available on GitHub) is an extremely useful JavaScript library that enables you to have Microsoft Excel spreadsheets parsed directly in the browser without any backend interaction necessary. What makes SheetJS even more impressive is the ability to query spreadsheets in-place with an SQLite-compatible SQL language called WebSQL. Check out the example on the website to see how awesome this is. Together with a grid component such as Handsontable (source code) SheetJS allows for on-the-fly display, querying and manipulation of Excel ...

Sunday April 19th, 2015 by Bjoern in Web Applications

favico.js – Dynamic Content For Your Favicon

favico.js (source code on GitHub) is an interesting and possibly quite useful library that makes it possible to show dynamic, animated content in your web app's favicon. While it allows you to display all sorts of visual next to the browser's address bar - such as videos or even web cams live streams - the most useful use case favico.js lends itself to probably is displaying badges and notifications. favico.js provides animations, colour customization and custom fonts for these badges. Check out the ...

Sunday April 12th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.