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.

Enterprise UX: Huge Potential And Anything But Boring

Last year designer Uday Gajendar wrote this interesting post about why he designs enterprise UX suggesting more designers should follow suit. This is pretty much in the vein of another article by fellow designer Dave Malouf. I very much agree with this point of view. User experience in enterprise software generally has a huge potential for improvements that impact thousands of users in a meaningful way. Yes, enterprise software often isn't exactly nice to look at, cumbersome to use and generally not ...

Tracking Down Software Bugs, Automatically!

Last week MIT researchers published an article about an automatic bug-repair system called Prophet. Prophet is a machine-learning system that learns general properties and patterns of successful error corrections in software and applies those patterns to making new error corrections in other programs. While the possibility of having software track down and fix bugs automatically (which effectively would mean creating self-correcting computer programs) is exciting enough in its own right, Prophet possibly has far-reaching implications for verifying the general correctness of code ...

Sunday February 7th, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Software, Web Applications

Advice On Improving JavaScript Test Speed (by Shyp Engineering)

On their blog engineers of logistics service Shyp (defunct) talk about how they improved the turn-around times of their JavaScript test suite by an order of magnitude of 3 (i.e. 1000x), which is no small achievement. In a modern software development process continuous integration and continuous deployment play a vital role. These ensure that your software always is in an deliverable, tested state and ideally is deployed to production systems in a timely manner when a change has been made. This process ...

Sunday January 31st, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Internal, company-specific software frameworks are evil

OK, I'm exaggerating a little here, company-specific software frameworks aren't exactly evil as in the true definition of the word but who isn't fond of the occasional hyperbolic headline? What I'm trying get across is that most of the times, software frameworks developed within an organization specifically for solving that organization's business problems in a reusable, maintainable manner do more harm than good. Everybody who's been exposed to enterprise software development for longer than a very brief period has come across them in ...

Sunday January 24th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Software

Anna Debenham @ Fronteers 2015: Front-end Style Guides

At last year's Fronteers Conference in Amsterdam freelance front-end developer Anna Debenham talked about front-end style guides. If you've ever heard about Pattern Lab and Atomic Design - which frankly you should've if your doing anything front-end on the web - this is what this talk is about: Anna Debenham - Front-end Style Guides from Fronteers on Vimeo. Anna presents the various kinds of style guides and style guide frameworks available and shows some real life examples of actual company style guides ...

Sunday January 17th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web Applications

Hackers – Between camp and weird classic

Recently, I watched the film Hackers again. It's a weird, fast-paced jumble of tech paranoia, Camp, techno-babble, a contrived hacker youth sub-culture that - perhaps sadly so - neither existed at that time nor ever came to be. It's very much a 90s film with its colourful clothing, the techno music and the general premise that technology is going to change everything. The Web was in its first early boom phase and the people involved already felt that it would have ...

Sunday January 10th, 2016 by Bjoern in Software, Web

Chris Heilmann @ Fronteers 2015: Of Gaps, Fillers and Empty Spaces

At the Fronteers Conference in Amsterdam in October 2015 developer / evangelist Chris Heilmann gave a talk about our desire as web developers to innovate ever faster, mostly motivated by our feeling that - despite the drive to implement an ever increasing number of software products as web applications - browsers and the web as a platform can't yet compete with native platforms (specifically mobile ones) in many respects, to which belong for example: UI responsiveness, native look-and-feel and simple use ...

Sunday January 3rd, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Front End Development, Software, Web, Web Applications

Remy Sharp @ Fronteers 2015: The Art of Debugging

At the Fronteers Conference in Amsterdam in October JavaScript specialist Remy Sharp talked about "The Art of Debugging" or rather his debugging workflow and useful best practices and approaches for debugging JavaScript and HTML5 apps. The talk contains lots of useful information on this complex subject. So, if you're developing JavaScript applications this presentation is very much worth watching: Remy Sharp - The Art of Debugging from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Sunday December 27th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software

Zoltan Kollin: Misused mobile UX patterns

Zoltan Kollin, UX designer, co-organizer of the Amuse UX Conference and co-author of UX Myths (another highly recommendable collection of user experience tips and guidelines) recently wrote a post about misused mobile UX patterns. We've seen it all on the mobile platform of our choice: icons whose meaning is hard to guess the dreaded hamburger menu and hidden screens inconsistent gestures and features that are hidden behind them Zoltan mentions those and a few more bad practices, explains why they're bad and gives examples of better ...

Sunday December 20th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

Primate: Walking the tightrope between mediocrity and bankruptcy

In October I was at this year's Fronteers conference in Amsterdam. Fronteers is a front-end developers association that organises local events throughout the year but is most well-known for this - compared to others - small (around 500 visitors) but all the more exciting conference. The event sports a familiar atmosphere and a broad range of first-class speakers presenting about all sorts of front-end web development-related topics. The videos of this year's talks are now online. A particularly interesting talk was the ...

Sunday December 13th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Front End Development, Web

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.