my blog. for you.

Reden wir über Digitales.

Ich bin selbständiger IT Berater und Unternehmer in der Internet und Software Branche. Ich beschäftige mich mit Design, Enterprise Applikationen, Web Apps und SaaS Produkten. Ich entwerfe und entwickle Business Lösungen und Anwendungen. Ich helfe Unternehmen in Sachen Software Qualität und Wissenstransfer, z.B. mit Angular und Spring Boot.

Notifications in web apps: Mailgun and Twilio

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.If you want your web app to notify your users upon specific actions or events Mailgun and Twilio are great solutions for doing so. The former allows you to - among various other features involving eMail - send eMails via a nice and simple REST API. This is particularly handy because you don't have to worry anymore about delivering eMail asynchronously in order not to delay user actions in the browser. For example, with Mailgun ...

7. Juli 2013 by Bjoern in Web Applikation

i18n is a hard and largely unsolved problem

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.After last week's post about the intricacies of dealing with date and time representations in software I promised to write about another seemingly simple yet surprisingly complex area of software development: Internationalization. Some time ago a I wrote about an interesting presentation on i18n and localization in Rails by Heather Rivers of Yammer. If you're in any way dealing with internationalization (i18n) and localization (L10n) of software (which you basically should if you're into software development) ...

30. Juni 2013 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Web Applikation

The time! The time! Who’s got the time?

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.I'm currently working on an app that allows you to set and display dates and times in various ways. Hence, lately I've been working quite a bit with calendars, dates, times, date localization and all the funny intricacies that come with them. To name but a few of those: In some countries the week customarily starts with Sunday, while in others it starts with Monday. Some programming languages and date APIs use 0 as the index for ...

23. Juni 2013 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applikation

Being the build guy

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.Being the build guy, i.e being the one who is responsible for a smooth build and deployment process on a software project is a role that's usually disliked by developers: It means a lot of system administration rather than coding. If something breaks and development grinds to a halt the burden of getting the project on the road again usually is on the person who manages the continuous integration server. However, I think being the ...

16. Juni 2013 by Bjoern in Software

Eine sinnvolle Alternative zu QR Codes

Vor kurzem habe ich über den Unsinn von QR Codes in der Werbung geschrieben. Neben Zustimmung gab es auch ein paar Kommentare, in denen darauf hingewiesen wurde, dass es eben doch sinnvolle Anwendungszwecke für QR Codes gibt. Der einzig wirklich interessante Anwendungszweck darunter war meiner Meinung nach für Anwendungen wie z.B. AirDroid. Dabei authentifiziert man sich ohne Passwort und Co., indem man einen auf einem Bildschirm angezeigten QR Code mit seinem Smartphone einscannt. Sehr clevere Lösung. Alle anderen Anwendungszwecke, von metropolradruhr, über Infos ...

2. Juni 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Mobile Applikationen

Starting A Software Consulting Business

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.Recently, I've been asked about tips for starting a software consulting business. Some of those apply to that developer's specific environment but most are general enough to be applicable to any kind of software consulting business anywhere so I think they're worth sharing: First, you'd need to consider which market you'd like to address because this will decide how you acquire customers. Domestic only? Overseas / remote? I'd very much suggest the latter because in ...

28. April 2013 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Software

Creative Use Of Symbol Fonts: Time Display

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.In his article The Era of Symbol Fonts, Brian Suda refers to Timepiece Rounded, an OpenType font that makes use of the symbol font concept and specifically ligatures to display clock hands! For instance, a time string such as "19:52:45" will be displayed as follows: The source code for this contains merely text and and a bit of CSS styling: <div class="timepiece missswiss"><span class="clock" id="missswiss" style="display: block; font-size: 226px;">19:52:45</span></div> Pretty awesome!

21. April 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Web Applikation

BromBone – Headless Browser As A Service

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.A few weeks ago I wrote about PhantomJS, CasperJS and how those WebKit-based tools help with web app testing. While running your own PhantomJS instance should work alright in most cases, installing, optimizing and maintaining yet another software package on all of your dev machines and continuous integration servers adds more friction to your development process. Hence, I was wondering if there's a hosted PhantomJS service. In fact, there is: BromBone - a 'headless browser ...

7. April 2013 by Bjoern in Web Applikation

A Few Notes On Responsive Design

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.I've been doing quite a bit of work involving responsive web design lately, which is why I thought I'd share a few useful resources I came across. First, there's an article by Luke Wroblewski about the importance of considering mobile devices first for websites and web applications. Ethan Marcotte describes foundations and some techniques of responsive web design. An article by James Young deals with 'the top responsive web design problems and how to avoid them' Brad Frost ...

31. März 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Entwicklung, Mobile Applikationen

“Developers Just Can’t Design!”

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.Time and time again I hear statements such as: Developers just can't design! I think this point of view is mistaken. Not only does it state that software developers have a somewhat innate inaptitude for design but to some extent it also implies that for developers design is something not worth comprehending. „Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." There's a huge misunderstanding in this mindset: Design is not ...

24. März 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Reden wir über Digitales.