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 ...

Internal, company-specific software frameworks are evil

OK, I'm exaggerating a little here, company-specific software frameworks aren't exactly evil as in the true definition of the word but who isn't fond of the occasional hyperbolic headline? What I'm trying get across is that most of the times, software frameworks developed within an organization specifically for solving that organization's business problems in a reusable, maintainable manner do more harm than good. Everybody who's been exposed to enterprise software development for longer than a very brief period has come across them in ...

Sunday January 24th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Software

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

Survey for IT freelancers: How do you approach marketing and sales? – The results!

Ten days ago I published a survey for IT freelancers asking various questions about how they approach marketing and sales. As promised here are the results of the survey. Thanks a lot to everybody who participated: The survey was filled out by 31 freelancers, 22 of whom came via a link both posted on several forums and emailed to personal contacts directly. 8 participants clicked on the survey on Facebook while 1 filled it out on this website. Save for the last ...

Friday January 15th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship

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

Survey for IT freelancers: How do you approach marketing and sales?

As you probably know, I'm an independent IT consultant. Recently, I've been researching how to do marketing and sales in the industry in a bit more detail. I tried different approaches and made some experience with what works - and especially with what doesn't ... I'd like to share this experience with other IT consultants (e.g. through tutorials, best practices and tools for supporting sales processes). In order to get a better picture of how others in the industry approach marketing and ...

Tuesday January 5th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship

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

Remy Sharp @ Fronteers 2015: The Art of Debugging

At the Fronteers Conference in Amsterdam in October JavaScript specialist Remy Sharp talked about "The Art of Debugging" or rather his debugging workflow and useful best practices and approaches for debugging JavaScript and HTML5 apps. The talk contains lots of useful information on this complex subject. So, if you're developing JavaScript applications this presentation is very much worth watching: Remy Sharp - The Art of Debugging from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Sunday December 27th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software

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

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

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.