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.

Leadership

Last week I was asked by a friend what I consider the most important aspects of leadership. Spontaneously, I came up with the following two: transparency dependability A good leader should always be open about her objectives and the team's goals. She's supposed to communicate timely and clearly - especially when it comes to bad news. A leader should also be dependable, i.e.: She should adhere to her decisions, admit when she's wrong and not act behind people's backs or have an agenda of ...

Atomic Design

Recently, I came across an interesting concept called Atomic Design. In a nutshell, Atomic Design favours systems of reusable components in lieu of monolithic pages. Now, don't get me wrong. This is nothing utterly new, of course. Style guides and brand guidelines always consisted of reusable and combinable components, fonts and colours. However, in traditional web design up to the mid-aughts designs used to be rather fixed, rigid and monolithic. It wasn't until relatively recently that due to the responsive design movement ...

Sunday August 10th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design

Automating Boilerplate Software Development

Recently, I've come across an interesting service called Prelang and an open source project named Rails Composer that both strive to do away with a lot of the common boilerplate coding that comes with the initial setup of web apps. Interestingly, both target Ruby on Rails, a framework that prides itself in its DRY and convention over configuration approach towards programming. Hence, one wouldn't exactly expect Rails developers to be affected by tedious boilerplate programming that much. By and large, this probably ...

Sunday August 3rd, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Bad Processes, Budgeting and Constraints

In a recent blog post Ben Horowitz talks about how one bad process can poison your company culture and break the company's back. The takeaway is this: Many startup founders - interestingly especially those with an engineering background - screw up the budgeting process by not applying any constraints to growth. According to Ben Horowitz a typical budgeting process goes like this: Set goals that will enable us to grow Break the goals down so that there is clear ownership and accountability for each goal by ...

Sunday July 27th, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Design, Entrepreneurship, Software

Erik Spiekermann on Type as Visual Language

At this year's beyond tellerrand design conference Erik Spiekermann talked about type as visible language. Erik Spiekermann is a design and typography legend. Having started his career in the early 1970s he's been a both prolific and seminal designer. He's worked for BVG, Deutsche Bahn, Düsseldorf Airport, Audi, Volkswagen and Heidelberg Printing. So, chances are you've already come across some of his works and you've most certainly seen one of the typefaces designed by him. Besides imparting lots of knowledge on type, typefaces ...

Sunday July 20th, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Design

Accessible Design: Empowering People

At the beyond tellerrand 2014 design conference, Robin Christopherson talked about inclusive and accessible design (Technology - The Power And The Promise) Robin is Head of Digital Inclusion at AbilityNet - a company that according to their mission statement 'exists to change the lives of disabled people by helping them to use digital technology at work, at home or in education'. Being blind himself Robin provided an insightful perspective on the difficulties people with disabilities face in everyday life and how inclusive design ...

Sunday July 13th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web Applications

SVG is Ready For Prime Time

At the very inspiring beyond tellerrand 2014 design conference that took place from 19 - 21 May this year in Düsseldorf (I'll write another bit or two about this conference in the next few weeks), Chris Coyier (of CSS-Tricks fame) held an interesting talk on Scalable Vector Graphics aptly titled 'SVG Is For Everybody'. In this talk Chris explained that although SVG tends to be sidelined it's quite ready for being used extensively today. To name but a few aspects: SVG allows you ...

Sunday July 6th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web Applications

Why Design Matters

OK, you're right. Countless articles and great books by brilliant designers have been written on this subject. So, who am I to tell you why design matters? As matter of fact I'm not going to tell you anything new. It just happened that I came across a particularly hideous example of bad industrial design that underlines pretty well that Design isn't merely an ancillary feature but quite to the contrary the most essential aspect of a product. Design by committee always fails. Less is more. Design ...

Sunday June 29th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design

Spucke, Klebeband und COBOL

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Kürzlich brauchte ich eine Kopie eines bestimmten Kontoauszuges für mein Geschäftskonto. Naiv nahm ich an, dass dies einfach per Online Banking zu erledigen wäre. Leider fehlt eine entsprechende Option im Online Banking System meiner Bank, also rief ich bei der Telefon Hotline an. Dort wollte man mir dann auch in der Tat direkt weiter helfen, benötigte aber das Endsaldo des vorherigen Auszugs, das Anfangssaldo des folgenden Auszugs und den Monat des Auszugs, von dem ich ...

Sunday June 22nd, 2014 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software

Greatness, luck and storytelling

Recently, I've done some reading on computer history again. If you're interested in that sort of stuff and haven't read it yet go and have a look at Ars Technica's in-depth series on the history of the Amiga home computer. It's quite a comprehensive piece on a significant part of computer history that's largely forgotten today. This series and other documents such Dave Haynie's Deathbed Vigil remind me of how far ahead the Amiga was in many respects at that time. I'm ...

Sunday June 15th, 2014 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.