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.

Screw paper!

As a sort of follow-up to my post on bizarre, backward paper-based processes I recently doubled down on removing my remaining dependencies on paper and paper-based processes. With an reinvigorated passion for achieving "The Paperless Office ™" I did the following: scan all documents and invoices with PDFScanner (for macOS) store all scanned documents in Evernote sign documents with DocuSign have Zapier automatically store all invoices that arrived digitally via eMail in Evernote as well rigorously throw away everything that doesn't need to be stored for ...

Life, The Universe And Everything

The Egg - a short story by Andy Weir - provides an intriguing perspective on cosmology (that as someone told me more or less corresponds to Kashmir Shaivism) I'm not sure if the Buddhist term kōan technically applies here but this certainly is a tale made to both confuse and delight. As stories that question your world view go, another interesting one is The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. A bit longer but also very much worth the read.

Sunday February 23rd, 2014 by Bjoern in Ideas

Paper

Recently, I registered for Flinkster - a car sharing service operated by Deutsche Bahn. At first, I was pleasantly surprised at their rather straightforward online registration process. Little did I know then that their registration process also involved handing in a printed and signed document for confirmation of identity. Turns out I was in for a Kafkaesque farce of a process. Not only was I required to also hand in my passport and driving licence for identity verification, which could easily have ...

Sunday February 16th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship

Leaving your comfort zone

Leave your comfort zone is an oft-heard piece of advice on how to grow personally and generally get better at doing whatever is relevant to you. If you only ever stick to things you already know you deny yourself the opportunity to learn and experience something new. Why is leaving your comfort zone so hard then? Well, it should be. Doing something you're uncomfortable with initially means that the likely outcome is failure and failure is embarrassing. Sure, failure is an opportunity ...

Sunday February 9th, 2014 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship

Houdini – Automatically Generated Web App Tests

Houdini is was a new SaaS product - currently in private beta - that "watches you using your site and automatically generates end to end tests that run continuously in the cloud". After having added some JavaScript code to your web app Houdini will follow and record your clicks, inputs and actions. These recordings are then used for automatically generating tests that run continuously. So, if a code change breaks your app's front end behaviour you will be informed about this. This is ...

Sunday February 2nd, 2014 by Bjoern in Web Applications

Closer than you think

I've recently finished reading Avogadro Corp by William Hertling and the sequel A.I. Apocalypse. These books deal with the idea how artificial intelligence might come about today or in the near future. The story's main premise is the eponymous Avogadro Corp, a hardly disguised Google. This company, whose name is conveniently related to a large number as well, offers a wide range of Internet services: Search, web-based office suite, web-based eMail (AvoMail ...) and its own smartphone OS (AvoOS). Sounds familiar? The story ...

Sunday January 26th, 2014 by Bjoern in Ideas

nagg – Simple A/B Testing For Links

nagg is an interesting take on URL shortening. It lets you enter up to 4 links each of which will be presented to the user clicking on the link at a previously set rate. For example, if entering four links with a rate of 25% each, each link will be shown every fourth time a user clicks on the shortenend link. This allows you for instance to do quick split testing of marketing sites or landing pages.

Sunday January 19th, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Web

Don’t Break the Chain

Having now managed to write at least one blog post per week for over a year, something I resolved to do in order to both reflect upon ideas, events or interesting products and technologies as well as hone my writing skills, I've recently read that the notion of getting things done by doing them regularly following a disciplined pattern is Jerry Seinfeld's Productivity Secret: He [Jerry Seinfeld] said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put ...

Sunday January 12th, 2014 by Bjoern in Ideas

The Future of Coding: Simple, Responsive, Instant Feedback

Last year Daniel Siegel outlined what he thinks will be the future of computing: While trying to teach everyone to code certainly is well-intentioned and to some extent beneficial the idea falls short of what most people require of computing environments. Most people don't need comprehensive and complex development environments. They need to accomplish specific tasks that lend themselves to being solved by code yet most people don't need to develop enterprise-grade web applications or mobile apps. What's actually needed are simpler tools ...

Sunday January 5th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Unicorns And Revolutions

History is filled with two types of people: the ones that want to maintain a comfortable status quo and the ones that want to move humanity forward. In a recent article Jan Lehnardt calls for rethinking and in fact revolutionizing business culture. He makes a few good points. You really should read the whole article. However, in a nutshell its message is this: Throughout history there are those who try to maintain the current status quo for their own good. On the other hand, ...

Sunday December 29th, 2013 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.