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.

A Comprehensive Website Checklist

Under http://www.boxuk.com/upload/2014/02/Relaunched-Ultimate-Website-Checklist-2.0.pdf Box UK provides a very useful checklist for website launches and updates. Typography, testing, SEO, security: This checklist has you covered for all those important and seemingly trivial aspects to keep in mind when launching and maintaining a website.

Help Me Help You Dinner

Some time ago I read about an interesting concept called The Help Me Help You Dinner by Rand Fishkin. He describes this idea in a lot more detail but in a nutshell it is this: Find roughly 10 people in your geographic region who are first or second degree connections on your personal network. Choose people that you think both you can help with something and that might be able to help you in return today or in the future. Find a restaurant ...

Sunday May 4th, 2014 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship

ZenQuery: From Idea To Product In 2 Weeks

Earlier this week I've launched a new product called ZenQuery. In a nutshell, ZenQuery is an application that creates an instant REST API (with JSON, XML and CSV formats) for SQL queries. This allows you to easily access any kind of data from your database without having to deal with technical details such as database drivers, connections, ORM or caching. A typical use case is an enterprise company which for example wants to create a new mobile application. The data needed for such ...

Sunday April 27th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Web Applications

Superhero.js

Creating, testing and maintaining a large JavaScript code base is not easy — especially since great resources on how to do this are hard to find. This page is a collection of the best articles, videos and presentations we've found on the topic. Superhero.js is a useful and comprehensive list of articles about developing, testing and maintaining JavaScript applications. It deals with fundamentals of the JavaScript language, best practices and broaches subjects such as testing, tools and security. No matter if you're JavaScript ...

Sunday April 20th, 2014 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Web, Web Applications

OpenSSL Heartbleed Bug: Idea For New Password Management Protocol

On 07 April 2014 a very serious OpenSSL bug with the colourful name 'Heartbleed' was disclosed. You can read more about this bug here, here and on the blog of the Chuck Norris of cryptography, Bruce Schneier. You can check here if your website or a service you're using is affected by this bug. Suffice it to say that the consequences are as severe as can be for most of the core services of the Internet. GitHub, Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Evernote, Tumblr, ...

Sunday April 13th, 2014 by Bjoern in Web

Surrounded By Idiots?

This week a video called 'The Expert' (based the short story "The Meeting" by Alexey Berezin) was spread by a CNET article aptly titled 'This is how an engineer feels when he's surrounded by idiots': I think most engineers can relate to this situation. However, the real question remains: Why do engineers time and time again find themselves in such Dilbertesque situations. Is it really because we're surrounded by idiots, nitwits and PHBs? Perhaps, but this is only a small part of the ...

Sunday April 6th, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Software

Self Licking Ice Cream Cones

Chris Granger of LightTable fame has posted an insightful article on how better programming tools might come about. He argues that 'programming should be about solving problems' and that ideally 'programming is our way of encoding thought such that the computer can help us with it' but along the way we - as programmers - somehow lost these notions and in our daily work we predominantly deal with marginal problems, problems which are incidental to the problem we were trying to solve ...

Sunday March 30th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software

Telefondesinfizierer

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.»Ja, also schön«, nahm er den Faden wieder auf, »die Idee war, daß in das erste Raumschiff, die Arche A, all die genialen Führungspersönlichkeiten kommen sollten, die Wissenschaftler, die bedeutenden Künstler, verstehen Sie, die großen Macher; und ins dritte Schiff, die Arche C, kamen alle Leute, die die ganze Arbeit machen, die die Sachen tun und die Dinge machen; und schließlich in die Arche B - das sind wir - kamen alle übrigen: Filmproduzenten, Telefondesinfizierer, Frisöre, ...

Sunday March 23rd, 2014 by Bjoern in Business

Hemingway: Readibility Scores And Smart Suggestions On Style

Hemingway is an interesting new web app that not only assigns a score to the readability of your text but also makes smart suggestions regarding how to simplify your text in order to make it more understandable. Having worked on readability algorithms before I think this is a well-designed take on improving the usefulness of readability scores. Knowing that your text scores high or low in terms of readability only gets you so far. Hemingway additionally uses colour-coding to make suggestions such as: split ...

Sunday March 16th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software

Resources For SaaS Businesses And Enterprise App Developers

SaaS Club is a new website that keeps track of relevant resources for SaaS businesses and developers. These resources are organized both in categories such as 'product', 'metrics' and 'sales' and according to their target audience, e.g. 'developers & designers' or 'managers & product people'. Enterprise App Developer Atlas is an 'interactive map of the developer journey', i.e. it's a catalogue of tools for enterprise web app development. Tools are organized according to product phases and aspects such as API, testing, deployment ...

Sunday March 9th, 2014 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.