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.

Designer Lynx: Curated Links About Design

Designer Lynx is a curated collection of articles and other relevant resources such as design systems, icons, prototyping tools and software for designing user interfaces. Further categories include UI design inspiration and design topics such as colour and typography.

A Quick Reminder About the Relevance of Latency in Computer Systems

This Gist by Jonas Bonér gives a quick overview of the different latency values for accessing different kinds of data storage and memory systems and the order of magnitude by which they differ: Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know Putting this in perspective is particularly important in the context of service-based architectures like RESTful web services, Microservices and similar approaches. All-out service-based architectures might be the right the solution to some scalability and deployment problems in complex software systems but it's vital to keep ...

Sunday January 21st, 2018 by Bjoern in Software

Anjana Vakil @ RuhrJS 2017 – Immutable Data Structures for Functional JS

At RuhrJS 2017 Anjana Vakil gave a fascinating talk on immutable data structures for use with functional programming. This talk involves some great educational storytelling. Even if you've never had a computer science course on data structures and never entirely understood things like hashes, trees or tries, after having watched this talk you will!

Sunday January 14th, 2018 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Paul Verbeek-Mas @ RuhrJS 2017 – Calendar / Kalender / تقويم (aka, the fun of locali[zs]ation)

At RuhrJS 2017 Paul Verbeek-Mas gave an interesting talk on the joys and intricacies of i18n and l10n with regard to how time, dates and calendars are rendered in web apps:

Sunday January 7th, 2018 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Opinionated List of Essential WordPress Plugins

I have an personal, opinionated list of essential plugins that should be installed in every new WordPress instance for various purposes, a few of which are: security maintenance performance search engine optimisation (SEO) legal compliance So, without further ado here's my list of essential WordPress plugins: Advanced Automatic Updates Akismet Anti-Spam All In One SEO Pack Autoptimize BackWPup EU Cookie Law Google Authenticator Google XML Sitemaps Leverage Browser Caching Limit Login Attempts Social Media Auto Publish Wordfence Security WP Super Cache

Sunday December 31st, 2017 by Bjoern in Business, Software, Web

MailTrigger: A Simple HTTP-based Email Notification Service

Having to send some sort of transactional email in order to notify a user of an event or a task that needs to be taken care of is a commonplace requirement for many applications. While there's no shortage of libraries, APIs and services that help with one or more aspects of this requirement there's no simple yet comprehensive solution that covers everything from triggering an email event, managing the content of different notification email templates and actually sending the email. In order to ...

Sunday December 24th, 2017 by Bjoern in Software

Rachel Andrew @ RuhrJS 2017: Start Using CSS Grid Layout Today

As the obligatory CSS person at a JavaScript conference, at RuhrJS 2017 CSS expert Rachel Andrew gave a talk on CSS grid layouts and how they differ from flexbox layouts:

Sunday December 17th, 2017 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Sara Harkousse @ RuhrJS 2017 – Web Components: It’s all rainbows and unicorns! Is it?

At RuhrJS 2017 Sara Harkousse gave a talk on web components and custom elements in particular. In this talk she gives a hands-on introduction on how to get started with custom elements:

Sunday December 10th, 2017 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Paying for Developer Tools

Recently, a user named amerkhalid wrote this on Hacker News (commenting on a question about the market for developer tools): Agreed. Developers are hard bunch to sell to. We go out of our way to find free tools and almost look down on people who use decent IDEs or other tools. One example, when I finally got legit license for Sublime Text, all of my friends made fun of me for paying for a free software. I replied by criticising this attitude (that ...

Sunday December 3rd, 2017 by Bjoern in Business, Software

12 Factors for Building Quality Web Applications

When considering the different aspects that potentially contribute to (or detract from, mark you ...) quality, reliability and maintainability of a web application I always like to come back to the Twelve-Factor App. Originally created by Adam Wiggins in 2011 the Twelve-Factor App is a highly useful design framework for both creating new web apps and measuring and improving the quality of existing applications. This framework allows you to create and maintain long-term viable applications that make use of declarative formats, clearly ...

Sunday November 26th, 2017 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.