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.

Automating Processes: Meeting Notes

One of the key benefits of business software, or as a matter of fact, any software, is automation of tedious, repetitive tasks. One of the three great virtues of a programmer according to Perl creator Larry Wall is laziness as defined in: "The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many ...

Working Across Timezones in Remote Work Settings and Distributed Environments

When working in a distributed environment or remote work environment, as is increasingly - and quite fortunately - becoming the default for knowledge workers, and the software industry in particular, chances are, rather sooner than later you'll be collaborating across timezones. I'm currently collaborating with people from EDT, GMT, CEST, MYT, JST, and AEST timezones, for instance. Asynchronous communication is crucial in a remote work setting already when no time differences are involved. It becomes absolutely vital when people from different timezones depend ...

Sunday May 30th, 2021 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship, Software

My Remote Work Setup

I've been a proponent of remote work, new ways of work and different approaches to work culture and the opportunities and options those provide for a long time. While 2019 arguably was the year when remote work finally caught on for more than just a select few, 2020 most definitely was the year when remote work really took off - for obvious reasons. I'd like to quickly share some of the tools and components from my current setup, in terms of both specific ...

Sunday February 14th, 2021 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship, Software

Boring Solutions Revisited: Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley

Dan McKinley's article on choosing boring solutions, although not exactly new anymore, has been a welcome reminder for me to revisit the topic of of using boring solutions and keeping things simple. Dan makes the point that "adding technology to your company comes with a cost" or as I stated in my own article on this subject: "The elephant in the room is: There’s an opportunity cost to everything." Most choices come with a trade-off. If you decide to use a technology for the ...

Sunday October 13th, 2019 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Software

Keep it simple, stupid

As something of a follow-up on my article on using boring solutions from two weeks ago I'd like to point you to a blog post by Justin Etheredge, cofounder of software development company Simple Thread: Software Complexity Is Killing Us In this post Justin outlines in which ways software development has become easier in the past few decades and also points out the ways in which it hasn't. Most of the complexity of software applications accumulates in the layer that deals with business processes. ...

Sunday June 10th, 2018 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Software

Use Boring Solutions

Often when working with both startups and project teams at larger, more seasoned companies I encounter a variation of the not invented here syndrome. This usually starts with the well-intentioned idea that in order to build the actual product you need ancillary services A, B and C in order for the product to work. However, more often than not instead of building the 'perfect' solution for your product yourself it might be a good idea to take a step back and think about ...

Sunday May 27th, 2018 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Software

Christopher Murphy: Time + Creativity

In this beyond tellerrand talk designer Christopher Murphy emphasizes the importance of procrastination and reserving time for experimentation and endeavours not directly related to a specific goal at hand: Time + Creativity - Christopher Murphy - btconfDUS 2016 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. While procrastination usually is seen as something negative - and in most cases rightfully so - setting aside time for a free flow of thoughts and ideas that's not immediately purpose-driven is an essential part of any creative process ...

Sunday July 17th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

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

Don’t Break the Chain

Having now managed to write at least one blog post per week for over a year, something I resolved to do in order to both reflect upon ideas, events or interesting products and technologies as well as hone my writing skills, I've recently read that the notion of getting things done by doing them regularly following a disciplined pattern is Jerry Seinfeld's Productivity Secret: He [Jerry Seinfeld] said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put ...

Sunday January 12th, 2014 by Bjoern in Ideas

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.