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.

Screw paper!

As a sort of follow-up to my post on bizarre, backward paper-based processes I recently doubled down on removing my remaining dependencies on paper and paper-based processes. With an reinvigorated passion for achieving "The Paperless Office ™" I did the following: scan all documents and invoices with PDFScanner (for macOS) store all scanned documents in Evernote sign documents with DocuSign have Zapier automatically store all invoices that arrived digitally via eMail in Evernote as well rigorously throw away everything that doesn't need to be stored for ...

Houdini – Automatically Generated Web App Tests

Houdini is was a new SaaS product - currently in private beta - that "watches you using your site and automatically generates end to end tests that run continuously in the cloud". After having added some JavaScript code to your web app Houdini will follow and record your clicks, inputs and actions. These recordings are then used for automatically generating tests that run continuously. So, if a code change breaks your app's front end behaviour you will be informed about this. This is ...

Sunday February 2nd, 2014 by Bjoern in Web Applications

The Future of Coding: Simple, Responsive, Instant Feedback

Last year Daniel Siegel outlined what he thinks will be the future of computing: While trying to teach everyone to code certainly is well-intentioned and to some extent beneficial the idea falls short of what most people require of computing environments. Most people don't need comprehensive and complex development environments. They need to accomplish specific tasks that lend themselves to being solved by code yet most people don't need to develop enterprise-grade web applications or mobile apps. What's actually needed are simpler tools ...

Sunday January 5th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Unicorns And Revolutions

History is filled with two types of people: the ones that want to maintain a comfortable status quo and the ones that want to move humanity forward. In a recent article Jan Lehnardt calls for rethinking and in fact revolutionizing business culture. He makes a few good points. You really should read the whole article. However, in a nutshell its message is this: Throughout history there are those who try to maintain the current status quo for their own good. On the other hand, ...

Sunday December 29th, 2013 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Software

Natural Language User Interfaces And Internet Search

Recently, there was an article at Wired about IBM’s Watson and how IBM might be able to supersede Google as the dominant search engine by providing a question-answering kind of search engine. Every few years the idea of a natural language / semantic / question answering search engine crops up again. Indeed, natural language understanding is quite relevant for the crawling and indexing part of information retrieval systems and Google is very good at that. Just look at their quite formidable automatic translation ...

Sunday November 10th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Web Applications

SEPA: Nutzerfreundliche Eingabe von IBAN und BIC

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.In 2014 wird die Nutzung von SEPA für Banküberweisungen und Lastschrift endgültig Pflicht. An sich ist gegen eine internationale Vereinheitlichung des Zahlungsverkehrs nichts einzuwenden. Allerdings lässt die Nutzerfreundlichkeit des ganzen Verfahrens deutlich zu wünschen übrig oder wie es mal kürzlich jemand ausgedrückt hat: "SEPA ist endlich mal etwas, das für Unternehmen und Privatleute gleich kompliziert ist." Die Eingabe und Prüfung von IBAN und BIC auf den meisten Websites ist kompliziert und fehleranfällig. Es gibt verschiedene Randfälle, die ...

Sunday October 27th, 2013 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Web Applications

Named Entity Recognition: Tools And APIs

Named entity recognition is a subtask of information extraction. It deals with extracting the names of persons, organizations, locations, expressions of times, quantities, monetary values, percentages etc. from unstructured or semi-structured data such as eMails or web pages. These are few useful tools and APIs that provide named entity recognition functionality: AlchemyAPI: REST API that provides a number of natural language processing (NLP) and information extraction features DPpedia Spotlight: Automatically links DPpedia resources OpenCalais: NLP API / web service by Thomson Reuters

Sunday October 13th, 2013 by Bjoern in Software

TimeSheets: Stundenzettel für mite.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.TimeSheets ist ein Tool, das mit mite erfasste Zeiten tabellarisch darstellt. Nach der Eingabe des mite Kontonamens und API Keys können Zeiten nach Projekten und Zeitraum abgefragt werden. TimeSheets basiert auf Bootstrap und Angular mit verschiedenen Erweiterungen für i18n, localStorage und Co. TimeSheets kann unter https://bjoernkw.github.io/TimeSheets3/ genutzt werden. Der Source Code ist unter https://github.com/BjoernKW/TimeSheets3 verfügbar.

Wednesday September 4th, 2013 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

MemoEasy – Termine online buchen

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Terminausfälle sind für viele Unternehmen ein erhebliches Problem. Ärzte, Friseure, Versicherungsmakler - für diese Dienstleister und in vielen weiteren Branchen läuft ein Großteil des Geschäftes über vorab vereinbarte Termine ab. Nicht wahr genommene Termine sind daher nicht nur ärgerlich, sondern führen auch zu teils erheblichen Umsatzeinbußen. Solche Umsatzausfälle müssen dann erst einmal wieder aufgefangen werden. Ausgefallene Termine können kurzfristig nicht wieder neu vergeben werden. Oft werden Termine einfach deswegen nicht wahr genommen, weil Kunden ...

Tuesday September 3rd, 2013 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship, Web Applications

Less, but better

Great design is long-lasting. - taken from Dieter Rams' ten principles for good design. This particular principle is especially true for Rams' perhaps most seminal design, the record player Braun SK 4 that's commonly know as 'Schneewittchensarg' (Snow White's Coffin) in Germany: While the product itself is more than obsolete the ideas and concepts behind this design can still be seen in many modern day devices. This is especially true for most of Apple's designs, which draw heavily upon Rams' work.

Sunday August 25th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.