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.

RockHard Festival

Schwarz zu blau

Sunday May 12th, 2013 by Bjoern in Music

Über den Unsinn von QR Codes in der Werbung

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Vom BMWi gibt's jetzt die Start-App mit Infos für Startup Gründer. An sich ja keine schlechte Idee. Was mich aber irritiert ist mal wieder der QR Code. 'Einfach über den QR Code downloaden'. Ja klar, Moment, ich suche und lade mir eben eine von Dutzenden von QR Code Apps runter, mach ein Foto, geh auf den Link, der mich dann über Umwege zum App Store weiterleitet, wo ich dann die Start-App runter laden kann?! Die ...

Tuesday May 7th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design

Vernetzt euch: #blognetz

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Ende letzten Jahres setzte sich Johnny Haeusler auf Spreeblick für 2013 das Ziel, das Web zurück zu erobern. Kurz gesagt geht es ihm darum, dass sich schon seit geraumer Zeit öffentliche Meinung und Diskussionen im Netz von Blogs hin zu sozialen Netzwerken wie Facebook und Twitter verschieben. Das Problem dabei ist, dass Walled Gardens wie Facebook den Prinzipien eines offenen WWW widersprechen, in dem Inhalte dauerhaft und unabhängig vom Wohlwollen einzelner Unternehmen verlinkt werden ...

Sunday May 5th, 2013 by Bjoern in Web

Starting A Software Consulting Business

Recently, I've been asked about tips for starting a software consulting business. Some of those apply to that developer's specific environment but most are general enough to be applicable to any kind of software consulting business anywhere so I think they're worth sharing: First, you'd need to consider which market you'd like to address because this will decide how you acquire customers. Domestic only? Overseas / remote? I'd very much suggest the latter because in general it'll allow you to charge much ...

Sunday April 28th, 2013 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Software

Creative Use Of Symbol Fonts: Time Display

In his article The Era of Symbol Fonts, Brian Suda refers to Timepiece Rounded, an OpenType font that makes use of the symbol font concept and specifically ligatures to display clock hands! For instance, a time string such as "19:52:45" will be displayed as follows: The source code for this contains merely text and and a bit of CSS styling: <div class="timepiece missswiss"><span class="clock" id="missswiss" style="display: block; font-size: 226px;">19:52:45</span></div> Pretty awesome!

Sunday April 21st, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Web Applications

The Gentle Seduction – A Short Story About The Singularity

The Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler - originally published in Analog Magazine in 1989 - is an intriguing story about how the technological singularity might come to pass. It's based upon Ray Kurzweil's and Vernor Vinge's concepts of accelerating technological development and exponential growth (see law of accelerating returns). While I'm not sure about the singularity myself - there sure is a 'rapture for the nerds' aspect to it - the story makes for a compelling read. It deals with issues related ...

Sunday April 14th, 2013 by Bjoern in Ideas

BromBone – Headless Browser As A Service

A few weeks ago I wrote about PhantomJS, CasperJS and how those WebKit-based tools help with web app testing. While running your own PhantomJS instance should work alright in most cases, installing, optimizing and maintaining yet another software package on all of your dev machines and continuous integration servers adds more friction to your development process. Hence, I was wondering if there's a hosted PhantomJS service. In fact, there is: BromBone - a 'headless browser as a service'. BromBone is an infrastructure-as-a-service offering ...

Sunday April 7th, 2013 by Bjoern in Web Applications

A Few Notes On Responsive Design

I've been doing quite a bit of work involving responsive web design lately, which is why I thought I'd share a few useful resources I came across. First, there's an article by Luke Wroblewski about the importance of considering mobile devices first for websites and web applications. Ethan Marcotte describes foundations and some techniques of responsive web design. An article by James Young deals with 'the top responsive web design problems and how to avoid them' Brad Frost wrote about responsive navigation patterns, e.g. how ...

Sunday March 31st, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Mobile Applications

“Developers Just Can’t Design!”

Time and time again I hear statements such as: Developers just can't design! I think this point of view is mistaken. Not only does it state that software developers have a somewhat innate inaptitude for design but to some extent it also implies that for developers design is something not worth comprehending. „Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." There's a huge misunderstanding in this mindset: Design is not about painting. Design is not about drawing ...

Sunday March 24th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.