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.

Explorable Explanations And A Reactive Document IDE

It's no secret I'm a fan of Bret Victor's work and the notion that programming tools should interact with coding and provide immediate, responsive feedback to changes. Recently, I've come across two intriguing projects / products that both draw upon this idea: Carbide (currently available as an early alpha version) is a new kind of JavaScript IDE that both immediately visualises the result of code changes and allows you to manipulate and visually interact with your code using UI controls such as sliders. Explorable ...

William Hertling – Kill Process

I've recently finished listening to the audio version of William Hertling's latest novel "Kill Process" I think it's fair to say that I'm quite a fan of his novels and his writing. Kill Process is a bit of a departure from Hertling's Singularity series in that it doesn't deal with future events and science fiction technology but mostly takes place in the present day with a few exceptions for flashbacks to previous events in the protagonist's life. The novel has been described as ...

Sunday August 14th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Ideas, Software, Web

Shadow Gallery – I Believe

Shadow Gallery is one of those lesser known bands in progressive metal that deserve to have made the big time but unfortunately for one reason or another never did. Their most quintessential work so far probably is their 1998 album Tyranny still featuring singer Mike Baker, who unfortunately died in 2008. The album and particular this song I Believe (featuring a well-known guest singer from a highly successful progressive metal band ...) capture ideas and feelings that were prevalent with hackers, civil ...

Sunday July 31st, 2016 by Bjoern in Music, Web

Jeremy Keith About Resilience In Web Applications @ beyond tellerrand 2016

At this year's beyond tellerrand conference in Düsseldorf web developer Jeremy Keith gave a talk on resilience in web applications: Resilience - Jeremy Keith - btconfDUS 2016 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. The World Wide Web - or the Internet for that matter - since its inception always was designed as a resilient, fault-tolerant medium. This not just applies in a technical sense but in a social or even political way, too. As John Gilmore is famously quoted: "The Net interprets censorship as ...

Sunday May 29th, 2016 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Web, Web Applications

LOAD”*”,8,1

Last week, I met with a few friends for an evening of 80s retro computing - or retro gaming to be specific. We set up an Amiga 500 and a C64 and played classic games like Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, Dynablaster, Sensible Soccer, California Games and International Karate. It was great fun. Retro gaming of course is a lot about nostalgia but there's also something about many of these games that hasn't been achieved in many modern video games anymore: Instead of ...

Sunday March 13th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web

CoderDojo: Free Programming Clubs For Young People

At last year's Web Summit in Dublin I came across CoderDojo, a community that organizes free programming clubs for young people. Originally founded in Cork by entrepreneurs James Whelton and Bill Liao, CoderDojo is a volunteer-led 'grass roots'-type organization that promotes teaching programming to young people in order to support kids by giving them valuable skills that allow them to create stuff such as useful tools, products and art. At the same time efforts like this help tackle the shortage of people ...

Sunday February 28th, 2016 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Software, Web

Hackers – Between camp and weird classic

Recently, I watched the film Hackers again. It's a weird, fast-paced jumble of tech paranoia, Camp, techno-babble, a contrived hacker youth sub-culture that - perhaps sadly so - neither existed at that time nor ever came to be. It's very much a 90s film with its colourful clothing, the techno music and the general premise that technology is going to change everything. The Web was in its first early boom phase and the people involved already felt that it would have ...

Sunday January 10th, 2016 by Bjoern in Software, Web

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

Primate: Walking the tightrope between mediocrity and bankruptcy

In October I was at this year's Fronteers conference in Amsterdam. Fronteers is a front-end developers association that organises local events throughout the year but is most well-known for this - compared to others - small (around 500 visitors) but all the more exciting conference. The event sports a familiar atmosphere and a broad range of first-class speakers presenting about all sorts of front-end web development-related topics. The videos of this year's talks are now online. A particularly interesting talk was the ...

Sunday December 13th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Front End Development, Web

Web Summit 2015 in Dublin

A few weeks ago I've been to beautiful, vibrant Dublin for this year's Web Summit. Web Summit - self-proclaimed (and from what I've seen and experienced quite rightfully so) "world’s greatest tech fest" - is a 3-day event packed to the brim with a huge variety of talks and presentations on different tracks such as Design Summit, Enterprise Summit and Health Summit. Besides, there's a vast number of startups both pitching on a fewer smaller stages and presenting their respective products ...

Sunday November 29th, 2015 by Bjoern in Business, Software, Web

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.