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.

Advice On Improving JavaScript Test Speed (by Shyp Engineering)

On their blog engineers of logistics service Shyp (defunct) talk about how they improved the turn-around times of their JavaScript test suite by an order of magnitude of 3 (i.e. 1000x), which is no small achievement. In a modern software development process continuous integration and continuous deployment play a vital role. These ensure that your software always is in an deliverable, tested state and ideally is deployed to production systems in a timely manner when a change has been made. This process ...

Anna Debenham @ Fronteers 2015: Front-end Style Guides

At last year's Fronteers Conference in Amsterdam freelance front-end developer Anna Debenham talked about front-end style guides. If you've ever heard about Pattern Lab and Atomic Design - which frankly you should've if your doing anything front-end on the web - this is what this talk is about: Anna Debenham - Front-end Style Guides from Fronteers on Vimeo. Anna presents the various kinds of style guides and style guide frameworks available and shows some real life examples of actual company style guides ...

Sunday January 17th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web Applications

Chris Heilmann @ Fronteers 2015: Of Gaps, Fillers and Empty Spaces

At the Fronteers Conference in Amsterdam in October 2015 developer / evangelist Chris Heilmann gave a talk about our desire as web developers to innovate ever faster, mostly motivated by our feeling that - despite the drive to implement an ever increasing number of software products as web applications - browsers and the web as a platform can't yet compete with native platforms (specifically mobile ones) in many respects, to which belong for example: UI responsiveness, native look-and-feel and simple use ...

Sunday January 3rd, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Front End Development, Software, Web, Web Applications

Zoltan Kollin: Misused mobile UX patterns

Zoltan Kollin, UX designer, co-organizer of the Amuse UX Conference and co-author of UX Myths (another highly recommendable collection of user experience tips and guidelines) recently wrote a post about misused mobile UX patterns. We've seen it all on the mobile platform of our choice: icons whose meaning is hard to guess the dreaded hamburger menu and hidden screens inconsistent gestures and features that are hidden behind them Zoltan mentions those and a few more bad practices, explains why they're bad and gives examples of better ...

Sunday December 20th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

Stephanie Rieger – The Emerging Global Web

In this presentation Stephanie Rieger talks about how the web is accessed and used in emerging economies in Africa and Asia and why mobile plays a dominant role in developing countries: Stephanie Rieger – The Emerging Global Web – beyond tellerrand DÜSSELDORF 2015 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. From a developed economy point of view this is very intriguing. Though mobile devices already dominate the market in developed economies and mobile-first is the dominant design approach for new websites and apps in ...

Sunday October 25th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Web, Web Applications

Open-sourcing some of my project code: Freshcard and MemoEasy

Modern web development and software development in general for that matter wouldn't be possible without FOSS: free open source software. Whether it's web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, frontend frameworks like AngularJS or enterprise toolkits as for instance Spring, open source software is the solid foundation most modern software is built upon. It's quite likely the technology-fuelled growth we've seen for the last decades wouldn't have been possible if it hadn't been for open source software. So, while saying that open ...

Sunday October 4th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Jeremy Keith – Enhance!

Much in line with the talk about advancing the web without breaking it in his talk at beyond tellerrand this year Jeremy Keith argues for the benefits of starting with simple solutions to the problem at hand and building upon a solid foundation instead of giving in to the temptation starting out with ever more complex layers upon layers of complex tools and frameworks. Jeremy advocates progressive enhancement, that is making content accessible to every platform and browser while still using the ...

Sunday September 27th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Web, Web Applications

Christian Heilmann – Advancing the web without breaking it?

Web development today is characterized by a constant, rapid flow of new frameworks, CSS preprocessors, task runners, package managers, asset pipelines ... Angular, Ember.js, Backbone, React, Flux, Grunt, Gulp. Every week or so it seems there's a new JavaScript framework that does everything better than everything else before. We need to jump ship ever more frequently if we want to keep up and stay on the bleeding edge. There's constant bickering about which framework is better and which framework du jour ...

Sunday September 20th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Mobile Applications, Web, Web Applications

PPK – The Plural of Chromium is Chromia

He's the ultimate browser nerd. Peter-Paul Koch - commonly referred to as PPK - tests browsers and browser compatibilities so we don't have to. On his website QuirksMode he publishes articles and browser compatibility tables for each and every HTML5, CSS and JavaScript feature in the West. In his recent talk at beyond tellerrand he talked specifically about the mobile web and mobile web browsers in particular. Although the most dominant mobile platforms Android and iOS by and large both use WebKit-based ...

Sunday September 13th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web, Web Applications

Petro Salema – Designing Interfaces That Think @ beyond tellerrand Düssedorf 2015

Earlier this year at beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2015 I had the privilege to attend a talk by Petro Salema. Petro shared his insights about today's limits in human computer interaction, attention span, mental bandwidth and how to address these issues. While the subject matter itself is interesting enough already I've never personally witnessed such rivetting storytelling before. He started his talk with a captivating story from his home country Tanzania about Bwakila, a machete-wielding madmen. This story nicely set the ground for the ...

Sunday August 16th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Software, Web, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.