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.

Arbeitnehmerüberlassung? Nein, danke!

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Der Markt für Aufträge für IT Berater wird ganz wesentlich von so genannten Vermittlern dominiert - Unternehmen, die als Mittelsmänner zwischen Dienstleistern und Kunden fungieren. Die Gründe dafür sind vielfältig, haben unter anderem mit dem deutschen Gesetz zur "Scheinselbständigkeit", aber auch mit der unzureichenden Positionierung vieler IT Freiberufler am Markt zu tun. In letzter Zeit häufen sich kuriose Auftragsanfragen einiger dieser Vermittler: In der Projekt-Ausschreibung wird zunächst eindeutig nach Freiberuflern gesucht. Kommt es dann im ...

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

spaCy – A fast natural language processing library

spaCy is a rather new library (written in Python and Cython) for performing various NLP-related tasks such as tokenization, POS-tagging and syntactic parsing. The authors claim it's faster (in some cases a lot faster) than other common solutions such as NLTK or Stanford's CoreNLP and peer reviews seem to corroborate these claims. spaCy is English-only for now. If you're working on performance-intensive NLP tasks and if that's no deal-breaker for you might want to check it out. The source code is available ...

Sunday November 22nd, 2015 by Bjoern in Software

Fonts in use: Typefaces in the wild

I like the simple elegance of type, the multitude of typefaces - from very ancient to very modern - available today and the vast range of intent, identity, tone and voice typefaces allow you to convey. I think you could say I'm fond of fonts (though as any type nerd will tell you there's a subtle, yet distinct, though today not anymore relevant difference between the two) ... Seeing fonts in use in the wild is really intriguing because it shows what ...

Sunday November 15th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design

How to succeed in business as an introvert

In this article entrepreneur Michael Shreeve provides an interesting "Introvert’s Guide To Success In Business". The cliché of a typical entrepreneur still is something like an alpha-type salesperson who's always on the phone, in sales meetings or otherwise presenting and selling his or her product. While it's absolutely true that as an entrepreneur you always have to be selling to succeed there are many different approaches of doing so. Don't do things that don't work for you just because you feel obligated by ...

Sunday November 8th, 2015 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship

Rachel Nabors: Animating the User Experience

In this talk interaction developer and cartoonist Rachel Nabors explains the six components of motion design and how to apply those in order not to make your UI just flashy (or should I say "gaudy"?) but to actually create a better user experience and make use of animation to support your website's or application's intent:

Sunday November 1st, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web

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

Cameron Herold: Let’s raise kids to be entrepreneurs

In this fast-paced TED talk entrepreneur Cameron Herold talks about why kids should be raised to be entrepreneurs instead of being lawyers or accountants. By and large, society and our educational system predominantly prepares children for corporate jobs. This is a huge missed opportunity because many children have entrepreneurial traits and skills like creativity, storytelling, tenacity, networking, problem-solving and negotiating skills. However, we don't nurture those but teach kids to get and hold down a 'proper' job. Even the seemingly innocent concept of ...

Sunday October 18th, 2015 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship

Toby Shapshak: You don’t need an app for that

In a 2013 TED talk South African writer Toby Shapshak talks about innovation out of necessity and how entrepreneurs in Africa are solving real-world problems for both their own continent and the world as a whole:

Sunday October 11th, 2015 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Web

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

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.