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.

Libraries.io and Dependency CI: Open Source Library Discovery and Dependency QA

Recently, I came across Libraries.io and its companion service Dependency CI. Open Source Library Discovery and Dependency QA

Cracking the Code – David Jonathan Ross

At this year's beyond tellerrand typeface designer David Jonathan Ross gave an interesting talk about the typography of programming, including its history and the design rationale behind monospace fonts, in his own words hitting the sweet spot that is the nerd trifecta of history, programming and fonts: Cracking the Code - David Jonathan Ross - btconfDUS 2016 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. The talk contains a lot of intriguing insights into why programming fonts are designed the way they are, what UX ...

Sunday July 24th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Varying Degrees Of Software Quality And What To Do About It

When working on client projects I come across copious amounts of source code, which sometimes is very well-maintained, sometimes less so. The various code bases are as diverse as their owners and respective stakeholders: A few come with an inherent sense of quality, lots of unit tests serving as the specification for the product. They're typically delightful to maintain and extend. Some though at times leave the impression of having been cobbled together in a rather haphazard, impromptu manner in order to solve ...

Sunday March 6th, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Software, Web Applications

CoderDojo: Free Programming Clubs For Young People

At last year's Web Summit in Dublin I came across CoderDojo, a community that organizes free programming clubs for young people. Originally founded in Cork by entrepreneurs James Whelton and Bill Liao, CoderDojo is a volunteer-led 'grass roots'-type organization that promotes teaching programming to young people in order to support kids by giving them valuable skills that allow them to create stuff such as useful tools, products and art. At the same time efforts like this help tackle the shortage of people ...

Sunday February 28th, 2016 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Software, Web

Tracking Down Software Bugs, Automatically!

Last week MIT researchers published an article about an automatic bug-repair system called Prophet. Prophet is a machine-learning system that learns general properties and patterns of successful error corrections in software and applies those patterns to making new error corrections in other programs. While the possibility of having software track down and fix bugs automatically (which effectively would mean creating self-correcting computer programs) is exciting enough in its own right, Prophet possibly has far-reaching implications for verifying the general correctness of code ...

Sunday February 7th, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Software, Web Applications

Internal, company-specific software frameworks are evil

OK, I'm exaggerating a little here, company-specific software frameworks aren't exactly evil as in the true definition of the word but who isn't fond of the occasional hyperbolic headline? What I'm trying get across is that most of the times, software frameworks developed within an organization specifically for solving that organization's business problems in a reusable, maintainable manner do more harm than good. Everybody who's been exposed to enterprise software development for longer than a very brief period has come across them in ...

Sunday January 24th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Software

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

EstiMate – Accurate Crowdsourced Software Development Estimates

Following up on last week's post I've launched a product site / MVP for EstiMate: Software development effort estimation probably is one of the more difficult tasks in software development. Even the most experienced engineers' estimates are off, too every now and then. Being a somewhat disliked task far too often effort estimation is neglected or done in a rather haphazard way. EstiMate tries to solve this problem with a measurable and reliable method for effort estimation that's based on actual data ...

Sunday January 11th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Software

About the Pitfalls Of Software Development Effort Estimation

Software development effort estimation probably is one of the most disliked, even feared tasks in software development and computer science in general. However crucial, even the most experienced engineers succumb to common pitfalls from time to time or their estimates are off, too every now and then. This is an especially striking phenomenon because software development effort estimation actually is a well-researched subject that a plethora has been written about. Starting in the 1950s IBM did a tremendous amount of research on ...

Sunday January 4th, 2015 by Bjoern in Business, Software

The Future of Software

In an article titled Programming: easier, better, faster, stronger. Giuliano Iacobelli of Stamplay writes about how programming might become easier, faster and more reliable in the future while decoupling creation of business logic from the need to write actual code. It's an important subject I've written about time and time again: How do we make programming more observable and more responsive? How do we allow more people to turn ideas and business processes into software? As Chris Dixon puts it: Software not only ...

Sunday December 7th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.