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.

Arbeitnehmerüberlassung? Nein, danke!

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Der Markt für Aufträge für IT Berater wird ganz wesentlich von so genannten Vermittlern dominiert - Unternehmen, die als Mittelsmänner zwischen Dienstleistern und Kunden fungieren. Die Gründe dafür sind vielfältig, haben unter anderem mit dem deutschen Gesetz zur "Scheinselbständigkeit", aber auch mit der unzureichenden Positionierung vieler IT Freiberufler am Markt zu tun. In letzter Zeit häufen sich kuriose Auftragsanfragen einiger dieser Vermittler: In der Projekt-Ausschreibung wird zunächst eindeutig nach Freiberuflern gesucht. Kommt es dann im ...

Web Summit 2015 in Dublin

A few weeks ago I've been to beautiful, vibrant Dublin for this year's Web Summit. Web Summit - self-proclaimed (and from what I've seen and experienced quite rightfully so) "world’s greatest tech fest" - is a 3-day event packed to the brim with a huge variety of talks and presentations on different tracks such as Design Summit, Enterprise Summit and Health Summit. Besides, there's a vast number of startups both pitching on a fewer smaller stages and presenting their respective products ...

Sunday November 29th, 2015 by Bjoern in Business, Software, Web

spaCy – A fast natural language processing library

spaCy is a rather new library (written in Python and Cython) for performing various NLP-related tasks such as tokenization, POS-tagging and syntactic parsing. The authors claim it's faster (in some cases a lot faster) than other common solutions such as NLTK or Stanford's CoreNLP and peer reviews seem to corroborate these claims. spaCy is English-only for now. If you're working on performance-intensive NLP tasks and if that's no deal-breaker for you might want to check it out. The source code is available ...

Sunday November 22nd, 2015 by Bjoern in Software

Rachel Nabors: Animating the User Experience

In this talk interaction developer and cartoonist Rachel Nabors explains the six components of motion design and how to apply those in order not to make your UI just flashy (or should I say "gaudy"?) but to actually create a better user experience and make use of animation to support your website's or application's intent:

Sunday November 1st, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web

Stephanie Rieger – The Emerging Global Web

In this presentation Stephanie Rieger talks about how the web is accessed and used in emerging economies in Africa and Asia and why mobile plays a dominant role in developing countries: Stephanie Rieger – The Emerging Global Web – beyond tellerrand DÜSSELDORF 2015 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. From a developed economy point of view this is very intriguing. Though mobile devices already dominate the market in developed economies and mobile-first is the dominant design approach for new websites and apps in ...

Sunday October 25th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Web, Web Applications

Toby Shapshak: You don’t need an app for that

In a 2013 TED talk South African writer Toby Shapshak talks about innovation out of necessity and how entrepreneurs in Africa are solving real-world problems for both their own continent and the world as a whole:

Sunday October 11th, 2015 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Web

Open-sourcing some of my project code: Freshcard and MemoEasy

Modern web development and software development in general for that matter wouldn't be possible without FOSS: free open source software. Whether it's web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, frontend frameworks like AngularJS or enterprise toolkits as for instance Spring, open source software is the solid foundation most modern software is built upon. It's quite likely the technology-fuelled growth we've seen for the last decades wouldn't have been possible if it hadn't been for open source software. So, while saying that open ...

Sunday October 4th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Jeremy Keith – Enhance!

Much in line with the talk about advancing the web without breaking it in his talk at beyond tellerrand this year Jeremy Keith argues for the benefits of starting with simple solutions to the problem at hand and building upon a solid foundation instead of giving in to the temptation starting out with ever more complex layers upon layers of complex tools and frameworks. Jeremy advocates progressive enhancement, that is making content accessible to every platform and browser while still using the ...

Sunday September 27th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Web, Web Applications

Christian Heilmann – Advancing the web without breaking it?

Web development today is characterized by a constant, rapid flow of new frameworks, CSS preprocessors, task runners, package managers, asset pipelines ... Angular, Ember.js, Backbone, React, Flux, Grunt, Gulp. Every week or so it seems there's a new JavaScript framework that does everything better than everything else before. We need to jump ship ever more frequently if we want to keep up and stay on the bleeding edge. There's constant bickering about which framework is better and which framework du jour ...

Sunday September 20th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Mobile Applications, Web, Web Applications

PPK – The Plural of Chromium is Chromia

He's the ultimate browser nerd. Peter-Paul Koch - commonly referred to as PPK - tests browsers and browser compatibilities so we don't have to. On his website QuirksMode he publishes articles and browser compatibility tables for each and every HTML5, CSS and JavaScript feature in the West. In his recent talk at beyond tellerrand he talked specifically about the mobile web and mobile web browsers in particular. Although the most dominant mobile platforms Android and iOS by and large both use WebKit-based ...

Sunday September 13th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.