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.

In Favour of Keeping Changelogs

Closely related to the art of the README, keeping a changelog can be tremendously helpful when reviewing or contributing to an existing software project or when trying to decide whether to use a new tool. keep a changelog by software developer Olivier Lacan is a website that reminds us of the benefits a "curated, chronologically ordered list of notable changes for each version of a project" provides. Moreover, the website also lists useful guidelines and principles for creating changelogs as well as anti-patterns ... Read more

Keeping a Record of Software Architecture Decisions

The need for asynchronous communication in organisations has become particularly obvious since 2020, when remote work and distributed work environments rapidly became the default setting for knowledge workers. Asynchronous communication essentially means that instead of exclusively communicating objectives, goals and the way by which to achieve them in-person (i.e. synchronously with everyone involved present at the same time - whether on-site or in a virtual space such as Slack or Zoom) we try and keep a digital record of decisions, the decision ... Read more

Blogumentation Revisited

Some time ago I wrote about a process called "blogumentation": Derived from the insight that arguably the best way to learn something and to internalise knowledge is to write about it and to try and explain that knowledge to others, blogumentation essentially means writing about a subject matter (e.g. a solution to a particular programming problem or a new practice you've just learned about) that you consider worth documenting and publishing the result. It means that instead of documenting something just for ... Read more

Beautiful Presentation of Code Snippets

In case you need to document and present source code and would like to do so in a visually appealing manner these tools might come in handy: Ray.so Carbon Source Code Shots With Ray.so being the most recent one and arguably also the one with the most stylish output, all of those generate decent-looking images of your source code snippets for embedding into documentation, blog posts, or eBooks, for example. Read more

CodeStream – Code as a Knowledge Base

CodeStream is a code review tool that allows you to conduct such reviews right in your IDE, i.e. without changing context. According to their master plan CodeStream is supposed to "Provide the ability to talk about any block of code, on any branch, in any state [...]" "Eliminate context switching costs [...]" "Treat codeblocks as a first-class object [...]" in order to allow developers, both new and senior ones, to quickly get up to speed with an existing codebase and to collaborate and draw upon each ... Read more

Remote Team Collaboration: Whiteboards With Google Jamboard

Two weeks ago I wrote about working collaboratively on digital whiteboards with Miro. Since 2017 Google has been selling competitively priced digital whiteboard hardware under its Jamboard brand. Alongside that hardware product, however, with Google Jamboard there's a companion software product of the same name as part of Google's G Suite collection of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools. Although Jamboard, the software, isn't widely promoted as an independent software product it works perfectly fine as a browser app without the Jamboard hardware. While not ... Read more

Remote Team Collaboration: Appointment Scheduling With Calendly

Calendly is an online appointment scheduling tool that allows you, your team, or your entire organisation to flexibly schedule meetings. As a user you can define available time slots and allow others to schedule meetings according to these time slots. Calendly taps into your usual online calendar tool (e.g. Google Calendar, Office 365 / Outlook, or iCloud). Instead of the usual back and forth though that commonly happens when trying to agree on an exact time and date for an appointment Calendly ... Read more

Remote Team Collaboration: Whiteboards With Miro

Miro is a collaborative whiteboard software that's ideal for exploring ideas and concepts in a distributed work setting. Much like a physical whiteboard it lends itself to ideation, brainstorming, design and planning sessions, i.e. work where the structure and nature of the outcome isn't necessarily known beforehand but rather freeform and loosely structured and the process by which these results are generated isn't particularly rigid. Miro provides the user with elements and tools such as sticky notes, freeform drawing, mind maps, grids, and ... Read more

Remote Team Collaboration: Interactive Presentations With Mentimeter

Continuing on my recent theme of remote team collaboration tools, today I'd like to suggest Mentimeter. Mentimeter is an interactive online presentation tool that allows you to engage with and gather feedback from meeting attendees, workshop participants, or team mates. Where with ordinary presentation tools your captive audience can just watch and listen, Mentimenter enables event organisers to collect feedback, keep everyone engaged, and make sure everyone's voice is heard. In addition to the ordinary content slides one would expect from presentation software, ... Read more

Remote Team Collaboration: Presentify

In the last two weeks I wrote about Zappy and Loom - tools that help you with sharing information, documenting work and collaborating visually in remote or distributed work settings. Continuing with this general theme, today I'd like to suggest another, similar tool: Presentify (Mac App Store) is macOS menu bar app that allows you to annotate any screen or highlight your cursor, no matter the context or app you're in. This makes Presentify a general-purpose presentation and teaching tool that's ... Read more
Next Page »