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.

Self Licking Ice Cream Cones

Chris Granger of LightTable fame has posted an insightful article on how better programming tools might come about. He argues that 'programming should be about solving problems' and that ideally 'programming is our way of encoding thought such that the computer can help us with it' but along the way we - as programmers - somehow lost these notions and in our daily work we predominantly deal with marginal problems, problems which are incidental to the problem we were trying to solve ...

Hemingway: Readibility Scores And Smart Suggestions On Style

Hemingway is an interesting new web app that not only assigns a score to the readability of your text but also makes smart suggestions regarding how to simplify your text in order to make it more understandable. Having worked on readability algorithms before I think this is a well-designed take on improving the usefulness of readability scores. Knowing that your text scores high or low in terms of readability only gets you so far. Hemingway additionally uses colour-coding to make suggestions such as: split ...

Sunday March 16th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software

Resources For SaaS Businesses And Enterprise App Developers

SaaS Club is a new website that keeps track of relevant resources for SaaS businesses and developers. These resources are organized both in categories such as 'product', 'metrics' and 'sales' and according to their target audience, e.g. 'developers & designers' or 'managers & product people'. Enterprise App Developer Atlas is an 'interactive map of the developer journey', i.e. it's a catalogue of tools for enterprise web app development. Tools are organized according to product phases and aspects such as API, testing, deployment ...

Sunday March 9th, 2014 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

Screw paper!

As a sort of follow-up to my post on bizarre, backward paper-based processes I recently doubled down on removing my remaining dependencies on paper and paper-based processes. With an reinvigorated passion for achieving "The Paperless Office ™" I did the following: scan all documents and invoices with PDFScanner (for macOS) store all scanned documents in Evernote sign documents with DocuSign have Zapier automatically store all invoices that arrived digitally via eMail in Evernote as well rigorously throw away everything that doesn't need to be stored for ...

Sunday March 2nd, 2014 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Software, Web, Web Applications

Houdini – Automatically Generated Web App Tests

Houdini is was a new SaaS product - currently in private beta - that "watches you using your site and automatically generates end to end tests that run continuously in the cloud". After having added some JavaScript code to your web app Houdini will follow and record your clicks, inputs and actions. These recordings are then used for automatically generating tests that run continuously. So, if a code change breaks your app's front end behaviour you will be informed about this. This is ...

Sunday February 2nd, 2014 by Bjoern in Web Applications

The Future of Coding: Simple, Responsive, Instant Feedback

Last year Daniel Siegel outlined what he thinks will be the future of computing: While trying to teach everyone to code certainly is well-intentioned and to some extent beneficial the idea falls short of what most people require of computing environments. Most people don't need comprehensive and complex development environments. They need to accomplish specific tasks that lend themselves to being solved by code yet most people don't need to develop enterprise-grade web applications or mobile apps. What's actually needed are simpler tools ...

Sunday January 5th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Unicorns And Revolutions

History is filled with two types of people: the ones that want to maintain a comfortable status quo and the ones that want to move humanity forward. In a recent article Jan Lehnardt calls for rethinking and in fact revolutionizing business culture. He makes a few good points. You really should read the whole article. However, in a nutshell its message is this: Throughout history there are those who try to maintain the current status quo for their own good. On the other hand, ...

Sunday December 29th, 2013 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Software

Natural Language User Interfaces And Internet Search

Recently, there was an article at Wired about IBM’s Watson and how IBM might be able to supersede Google as the dominant search engine by providing a question-answering kind of search engine. Every few years the idea of a natural language / semantic / question answering search engine crops up again. Indeed, natural language understanding is quite relevant for the crawling and indexing part of information retrieval systems and Google is very good at that. Just look at their quite formidable automatic translation ...

Sunday November 10th, 2013 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Web Applications

SEPA: Nutzerfreundliche Eingabe von IBAN und BIC

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.In 2014 wird die Nutzung von SEPA für Banküberweisungen und Lastschrift endgültig Pflicht. An sich ist gegen eine internationale Vereinheitlichung des Zahlungsverkehrs nichts einzuwenden. Allerdings lässt die Nutzerfreundlichkeit des ganzen Verfahrens deutlich zu wünschen übrig oder wie es mal kürzlich jemand ausgedrückt hat: "SEPA ist endlich mal etwas, das für Unternehmen und Privatleute gleich kompliziert ist." Die Eingabe und Prüfung von IBAN und BIC auf den meisten Websites ist kompliziert und fehleranfällig. Es gibt verschiedene Randfälle, die ...

Sunday October 27th, 2013 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Web Applications

Named Entity Recognition: Tools And APIs

Named entity recognition is a subtask of information extraction. It deals with extracting the names of persons, organizations, locations, expressions of times, quantities, monetary values, percentages etc. from unstructured or semi-structured data such as eMails or web pages. These are few useful tools and APIs that provide named entity recognition functionality: AlchemyAPI: REST API that provides a number of natural language processing (NLP) and information extraction features DPpedia Spotlight: Automatically links DPpedia resources OpenCalais: NLP API / web service by Thomson Reuters

Sunday October 13th, 2013 by Bjoern in Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.