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.

Continous Integration with Circle or: Coming Full Circle

I've recently tried out Circle, a hosted continuous integration service, and I'm quite thrilled about it. Registration / login works via GitHub. Once logged in, Circle lets you choose a GitHub repository and starts the first build right away. Circle claims that setup is as easy as: Sign up to Circle, Give Circle permission to access GitHub on your behalf, Click on a project repository From my experience so far this claim is absolutely correct. Configuration is completely automatic. I've only tried it with Rails so ...

Designing For Retina Displays

Under http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/08/20/towards-retina-web/ there's a nice article about what to consider in terms of high-resolution / Retina displays when designing your next website and how to address common issues with how websites are rendered on Retina displays.

Sunday February 17th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Web Applications

The World Runs On Excel

There's been a lot of talk lately about the importance of Excel and that Excel is everywhere. I'd even go as far as saying that most of the world in one way or another runs on Excel. Excel in my opinion is the best piece of software Microsoft has made so far (other people seem to agree with me, by the way). While Microsoft didn't invent the spreadsheet - that credit goes to VisiCalc and IBM with Lotus 1-2-3 - they were ...

Saturday February 16th, 2013 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Presentation on i18n and Crowdsourcing Localization in Rails

Linguistic Potluck: Crowdsourcing Localization in Rails by Heather Rivers of Yammer is a great presentation on the intricacies of web app internationalization, its linguistic implications and some awesome solutions to the most common i18n-related issues.

Sunday February 10th, 2013 by Bjoern in Web Applications

Backgrid.js – Tool Set For Creating Data Grids With Backbone.js

Backgrid.js is a toolset for creating data grids with Backbone.js. It simplifies creation and population of data grids as well as common data grid operations like sorting and pagination.

Sunday February 3rd, 2013 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Web Applications

Developing with Apache Wicket

I've been working with Apache Wicket on a rather complex client project for quite some time now and I'd like to share my experience. Apache Wicket is a component-based web app framework for Java. In contrast to MVC frameworks such as Rails (or Play and Grails in the Java world), which map requests to controller actions and views, Wicket is more similar to stateful GUI frameworks like Swing. Wicket applications are made up of trees of components. Each Wicket page is a root ...

Sunday January 27th, 2013 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Web Applications

Piraten auf Abwegen?

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Nach dem rasanten Aufstieg der Piratenpartei - die Partei trat in Deutschland immerhin erst 2006 überhaupt zu Wahlen an und war 2012 bereits in 4 Landes- und etlichen Kommunalparlamenten vertreten - folgte im Laufe des letzten Jahres ein noch rasanterer Absturz, der seinen vorläufigen Tiefpunkt im Ergebnis bei der Wahl zum niedersächsischen Landtag fand. Die schnelle und deutliche Erfolg der Piratenpartei liegt meiner Meinung nach darin begründet, dass alle im Bundestag vertretenen Parteien die Themen ...

Saturday January 26th, 2013 by Bjoern in Ideas

Live Tools For Building Website Elements

Ui Parade have released a series of design tools that allow you to have common website elements generated in HTML / CSS: http://livetools.uiparade.com These tools include: Button Builder Form Builder Icon Bulder Ribbon Builder Have a look at Ui Parade's actual website, too. It lists quite a bunch of useful and inspiring design elements.

Sunday January 20th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Web Applications

Regexper: Visualize Regular Expressions

Regexper is a new visualization tool that renders regular expressions as the equivalent finite-state machines. Very cool stuff, give it a try.

Sunday January 13th, 2013 by Bjoern in Software

WordPress Child Themes

A few days ago I read a very useful tip regarding customizing WordPress themes and why you should use child themes for that. In short, child themes allow you to extend and customize existing WordPress themes without compromising the ability to update the original theme. If instead you directly customized a theme your changes would be lost once you install an update (or have that update installed automatically).

Sunday January 6th, 2013 by Bjoern in Web, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.