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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.

What is a (business) process, actually?

The terms process and business process, in particular, are sometimes used lightly and without thinking too much about what those terms actually mean. Drawing upon and thinking in terms of the concept of a value chain (i.e., a set of activities designed to create a product or service that has value to a customer) some time ago I came up with this definition of what constitutes a process, not just when it comes to business and market value, but also with regard ... Read more

Stephen Fluin @ ng-conf 2018: Angular for Designers

At ng-conf 2018 Google Angular developer advocate Stephen Fluin gave this highly interesting talk on making Angular - and web development in general, for that matter - more accessible to designers: Sadly, what we often see in software development industry today is largely artificial boundaries being set up between roles that define themselves by the programming languages they use, e.g. front-end development vs back-end. In other words: Paradoxically, additional information silos are created, while software is actually meant to tear down information ... Read more

Daily Standup Meetings: Anti-patterns And What to Do About Them

Daily standup meetings are a mainstay of agile software development methods, such as XP, Kanban (which used to be an inventory control system having originated at Toyota) and Scrum, of course. Given that agile development methods are by far the most dominant ones in the software industry today, it should come as no surprise that daily standup meetings are a common feature of software development processes these days. These meetings basically serve the purpose of informing everyone on the team about these 3 ... Read more

Bad Processes, Budgeting and Constraints

In a recent blog post Ben Horowitz talks about how one bad process can poison your company culture and break the company's back. The takeaway is this: Many startup founders - interestingly especially those with an engineering background - screw up the budgeting process by not applying any constraints to growth. According to Ben Horowitz a typical budgeting process goes like this: Set goals that will enable us to grow Break the goals down so that there is clear ownership and accountability for each goal by ... Read more

Paper

Recently, I registered for Flinkster - a car sharing service operated by Deutsche Bahn. At first, I was pleasantly surprised at their rather straightforward online registration process. Little did I know then that their registration process also involved handing in a printed and signed document for confirmation of identity. Turns out I was in for a Kafkaesque farce of a process. Not only was I required to also hand in my passport and driving licence for identity verification, which could easily have ... Read more