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.

One Small Step

Chosen – User-friendly select boxes

HTML <select></select> boxes can be rather unwieldy and don't exactly cater for a stellar user-experience. To alleviate that pain Harvest provide a highly useful jQuery plugin that's been adequately named Chosen. Apart from a nice CSS styling Chosen adds several user interface improvements to vanilla HTML select boxes such as search, easy-to-use multiple selections and option groups. Using Chosen is as easy as adding the following JavaScript code to your website: $('select').chosen(); This will automatically spruce up and enrich every select box on your website ...

Sunday July 14th, 2013 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Notifications in web apps: Mailgun and Twilio

If you want your web app to notify your users upon specific actions or events Mailgun and Twilio are great solutions for doing so. The former allows you to - among various other features involving eMail - send eMails via a nice and simple REST API. This is particularly handy because you don't have to worry anymore about delivering eMail asynchronously in order not to delay user actions in the browser. For example, with Mailgun you can simply commit a registration confirmation ...

Sunday July 7th, 2013 by Bjoern in Web Applications

i18n is a hard and largely unsolved problem

After last week's post about the intricacies of dealing with date and time representations in software I promised to write about another seemingly simple yet surprisingly complex area of software development: Internationalization. Some time ago a I wrote about an interesting presentation on i18n and localization in Rails by Heather Rivers of Yammer. If you're in any way dealing with internationalization (i18n) and localization (L10n) of software (which you basically should if you're into software development) have a look at the video of ...

Sunday June 30th, 2013 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Web Applications

The time! The time! Who’s got the time?

I'm currently working on an app that allows you to set and display dates and times in various ways. Hence, lately I've been working quite a bit with calendars, dates, times, date localization and all the funny intricacies that come with them. To name but a few of those: In some countries the week customarily starts with Sunday, while in others it starts with Monday. Some programming languages and date APIs use 0 as the index for the first day of the week, some ...

Sunday June 23rd, 2013 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Being the build guy

Being the build guy, i.e being the one who is responsible for a smooth build and deployment process on a software project is a role that's usually disliked by developers: It means a lot of system administration rather than coding. If something breaks and development grinds to a halt the burden of getting the project on the road again usually is on the person who manages the continuous integration server. However, I think being the build guy on a project actually is ...

Sunday June 16th, 2013 by Bjoern in Software

The Tinfoil Hats Were Right All Along

There sure is a lot to rant and be angry about concerning this week's revelations about PRISM and how the US government has been issuing blanket orders to tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple requiring them to hand over personal data, effectively allowing agencies like the NSA to spy on all of us. These events mark a turning point for the way of how citizens are treated by their government and the legal system. While until now the presumption of ...

Sunday June 9th, 2013 by Bjoern in Ideas

Eine sinnvolle Alternative zu QR Codes

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Vor kurzem habe ich über den Unsinn von QR Codes in der Werbung geschrieben. Neben Zustimmung gab es auch ein paar Kommentare, in denen darauf hingewiesen wurde, dass es eben doch sinnvolle Anwendungszwecke für QR Codes gibt. Der einzig wirklich interessante Anwendungszweck darunter war meiner Meinung nach für Anwendungen wie z.B. AirDroid. Dabei authentifiziert man sich ohne Passwort und Co., indem man einen auf einem Bildschirm angezeigten QR Code mit seinem Smartphone einscannt. Sehr clevere ...

Sunday June 2nd, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Mobile Applications

Philipp Rösler, Silicon Valley und der Dude

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Philipp Rösler war kürzlich im Silicon Valley. Mit dabei waren etliche deutsche IT Startup Gründer. Ihr Ziel war es, die deutsche IT Branche zu präsentieren und hierzulande dringend nötiges Wagniskapital für Investitionen in IT Gründungen anzuwerben. Was davon dann vom Silicon Valley - durch den deutschen Politboulevardjournalismus vermittelt - daheim im Tal der Ahnungslosen ankam, glich dann aber eher einer Seifenoper. Kaum ein Wort darüber, dass Rösler und die ihn begleitenden Gründer in Kalifornien versuchten, ...

Sunday May 26th, 2013 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship

RockHard Festival

Sunday May 19th, 2013 by Bjoern in Music

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.