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.

WordPress Child Themes

A few days ago I read a very useful tip regarding customizing WordPress themes and why you should use child themes for that. In short, child themes allow you to extend and customize existing WordPress themes without compromising the ability to update the original theme. If instead you directly customized a theme your changes would be lost once you install an update (or have that update installed automatically).

Collaborating with GitHub and Dropbox

Git and GitHub are awesome tools for developers. Version control systems have been used for quite some time and for good reasons. Git, its distributed approach and GitHub's social coding features like pull requests for instance have introduced a whole new dimension to collaborative software development. However, when working with non-coders (e.g. graphic designers) on projects using Git for managing source files like CSS and JavaScript assets that have to be touched by both developers and web designers can prove to be ...

Sunday December 23rd, 2012 by Bjoern in Software

Automatic Updates for WordPress

I'd like to introduce you (or rather the WordPress users amongst you) to one of the lesser known gems for WordPress - the Automatic Updater plugin. This plugin automatically updates your WordPress core installation as well as installed plugins and themes, which is a boon, especially if you have to maintain several WordPress installations.

Thursday December 20th, 2012 by Bjoern in Web, Web Applications

Numbers: A Mathematics Toolkit For node.js / JavaScript

Numbers is an advanced mathematics toolkit for JavaScript and Node.js developed by Steve Kaliski, @sjkaliski: Numbers provides a comprehensive set of mathematical tools that currently are not offered in JavaScript. These tools include: Basic calculations Calculus Matrix Operations Prime Numbers Statistics Very interesting stuff.

Tuesday December 18th, 2012 by Bjoern in Web Applications

Bauhaus and Web Design

The other day I've read this somewhat older yet still relevant article by Simon Collision: Bauhaus Ideology and the Future of Web Design. In a stream of thought kind of way it deals with the main tenets of the Bauhaus school of thought and how those relate to modern and future web design. It draws upon Bauhaus ideas such as "form follows function", simplicity and the unification of art, craft, and technology - most of which seem oddly familiar in the context ...

Sunday December 16th, 2012 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web

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 ...

Wednesday December 12th, 2012 by Bjoern in Web Applications

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

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.