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.

Sauce Labs – Cross Browser Testing

Cross browser testing is a notoriously cumbersome problem. When developing web applications or websites any decent web developer or designer will try to test her work not only on her local machine, browser and operating system combination but will strive to cover as many reasonable environments that hold a certain market share as possible. Provisioning all those configurations with every possible combination of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer and OSX, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS can cause quite some headaches, not ...

Virtues of a Programmer

"We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris." - Larry Wall, Programming Perl (1st edition), O'Reilly Media Recently, I've come across those remarkable words by Larry Wall, creator of Perl, again. When I first read them many years ago they made quite some impression on me. I think those virtues subsume pretty well what it means to be a good programmer. Besides, I just like Larry Wall's witty, sometimes quirky, way of putting ...

Sunday December 9th, 2012 by Bjoern in Software

Publishing for tablets – A market ripe for disruption

This week there were two quite intriguing posts on 37signals' Signal vs. Noise blog: Tablets are waiting for their Movable Type Publishers shouldn't be app developers Both posts deal with the shortcomings of magazine and newspaper publishing for tablets like the iPad. Currently, publishing for the iPad and other tablets mostly amounts to magazine publishers writing native apps that wrap their content. Given that magazine publishers usually don't specialize in software development more often than not this entails slow, unstable apps and a generally ...

Sunday December 2nd, 2012 by Bjoern in Business, Mobile Applications, Web, Web Applications

New publishing tools

Recently, I came across a few interesting publishing tools: ShareLaTeX allows you to collaboratively edit LaTeX documents: https://www.sharelatex.com Anthologize is aWordPress plugin with which you can export the content of a WordPress blog as an eBook: http://anthologize.org Docverter is an open source server software that allows you to convert markup formats such as HTML, Markdown or LaTeX into print publishing formats like PDF or EPUB: http://www.docverter.com, source code: https://github.com/docverter/docverter These tools should be very interesting to those who produce online content and would like to ...

Saturday November 24th, 2012 by Bjoern in Web Applications

WebSphere Blues

Lately, I've been doing a lot of work for a customer involving deployment and configuration of applications on IBM WebSphere Application Server. While I really dislike being the grumpy developer I just have to say that WebSphere Application Server - at least till version 6, which is the one I'm working on - sucks beyond measure. I can hardly think of any piece of software as ill-conceived, convoluted and error-prone as this one. Usually, Java applications live up to SUN's "Write once, run anywhere" claim but not so with IBM ...

Thursday November 22nd, 2012 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software

Open-sourcing more of my stuff: Twoice, a ‘Twitter for voice messages’ prototype

Twoice is a prototype of a 'Twitter for voice messages' app built with Grails 1.3.6 (http://grails.org) and some HTML5 and Comet for the UI. It's a nice idea, which has been lingering on my hard disk far too long so I've now released it under the MIT license: https://github.com/BjoernKW/Twoice

Thursday November 22nd, 2012 by Bjoern in Web Applications

Topicalizer – an information extraction suite – now open source

Topicalizer is a suite of text analysis and information extraction tools developed by me. It used to be available under http://www.topicalizer.com. However, I unfortunately don't have any time any more to properly maintain it, which is why I'm open-sourcing the code for others to learn from and build upon: https://github.com/BjoernKW/Topicalizer

Thursday November 22nd, 2012 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Web Applications

HTML5 Or Native Mobile Apps: Which is the way to go?

Today, MG Siegler ranted about as to why native mobile app development is better than developing HTML5 web apps. I strongly disagree with his point of view. Besides technical reasons, the question if to develop a native (say iOS) or HTML5 app is much more about culture, speed and agility of development. Sure, native apps will provide a richer experience at the first glimpse but there isn't really all that much you can't do with HTML5 nowadays. The really important point, however ...

Thursday November 22nd, 2012 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.