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.

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 ...

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

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

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.