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.

Robin Christopherson – Technology – The Power And The Promise

Some time ago I wrote about Robin Christopherson's talk on accessible and inclusive design at beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2014. A video of this excellent talk is now online: Robin Christopherson – Technology - The Power And The Promise – beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2014 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.

Sunday September 21st, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

On Hiring Developers

Laurie Voss, CTO at npm posted an interesting article on why many companies aren't able to hire good developers in spite of elaborate hiring and interviewing processes. It's a rather lengthy post but very much worth the read. The gist is this: Don't hire someone for what they know already, hire someone for potential and eagerness to grow. Hire people capable of both solving complex problems and communicating clearly. Last not least: Don't hire assholes. The author's own TL;DR is this: Many interview ...

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

Deep Learning for NLP

Richard Socher, Chris Manning and Yoshua Bengio have created a tutorial on "Deep Learning for NLP (without Magic)". The tutorial includes slides and two videos of talks held on the subject. It deals with how deep learning algorithms can be applied in natural language processing. Deep learning is a set of algorithms and models which work under the assumption that observed data is generated from multiple layers of hidden representations that interact with each other. Although not really new and for some ...

Sunday August 24th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software

Automating Boilerplate Software Development

Recently, I've come across an interesting service called Prelang and an open source project named Rails Composer that both strive to do away with a lot of the common boilerplate coding that comes with the initial setup of web apps. Interestingly, both target Ruby on Rails, a framework that prides itself in its DRY and convention over configuration approach towards programming. Hence, one wouldn't exactly expect Rails developers to be affected by tedious boilerplate programming that much. By and large, this probably ...

Sunday August 3rd, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Bad Processes, Budgeting and Constraints

In a recent blog post Ben Horowitz talks about how one bad process can poison your company culture and break the company's back. The takeaway is this: Many startup founders - interestingly especially those with an engineering background - screw up the budgeting process by not applying any constraints to growth. According to Ben Horowitz a typical budgeting process goes like this: Set goals that will enable us to grow Break the goals down so that there is clear ownership and accountability for each goal by ...

Sunday July 27th, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Design, Entrepreneurship, Software

Accessible Design: Empowering People

At the beyond tellerrand 2014 design conference, Robin Christopherson talked about inclusive and accessible design (Technology - The Power And The Promise) Robin is Head of Digital Inclusion at AbilityNet - a company that according to their mission statement 'exists to change the lives of disabled people by helping them to use digital technology at work, at home or in education'. Being blind himself Robin provided an insightful perspective on the difficulties people with disabilities face in everyday life and how inclusive design ...

Sunday July 13th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web Applications

SVG is Ready For Prime Time

At the very inspiring beyond tellerrand 2014 design conference that took place from 19 - 21 May this year in Düsseldorf (I'll write another bit or two about this conference in the next few weeks), Chris Coyier (of CSS-Tricks fame) held an interesting talk on Scalable Vector Graphics aptly titled 'SVG Is For Everybody'. In this talk Chris explained that although SVG tends to be sidelined it's quite ready for being used extensively today. To name but a few aspects: SVG allows you ...

Sunday July 6th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web Applications

Spucke, Klebeband und COBOL

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Kürzlich brauchte ich eine Kopie eines bestimmten Kontoauszuges für mein Geschäftskonto. Naiv nahm ich an, dass dies einfach per Online Banking zu erledigen wäre. Leider fehlt eine entsprechende Option im Online Banking System meiner Bank, also rief ich bei der Telefon Hotline an. Dort wollte man mir dann auch in der Tat direkt weiter helfen, benötigte aber das Endsaldo des vorherigen Auszugs, das Anfangssaldo des folgenden Auszugs und den Monat des Auszugs, von dem ich ...

Sunday June 22nd, 2014 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software

Huge Potential For Mesh Networking In Mobile Phones

Apple's iOS 7 contains a highly interesting but until now very much under-appreciated feature that Apple calls Multipeer Connectivity. Another name for this feature is mesh network and it potentially can change the world. Basically, a mesh network is a network topology, in which each participant is connected to every other participant. This results in a dense network that's particularly resilient towards failures and tampering from outside. In contrast to that the computer networks we commonly use for the most part employ a ...

Sunday June 8th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web

ZenQuery 1.0 is available today!

A few weeks ago I wrote about a new product I'm currently developing: ZenQuery, an Enterprise Backend as a Service. I’m pleased to announce the first public version of ZenQuery today. Since the first public announcement regarding ZenQuery roughly 30 days ago we’ve been busy working on this release. Today, you’ll be able to try out ZenQuery 1.0 yourselves on your own server and environment. I really hope you like what we’ve got for you so far. For more information please have a ...

Wednesday May 21st, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.