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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.

Modern SQL (with PostgreSQL)

SQL expert Markus Winand some time ago posted an insightful presentation on Modern SQL (mostly PostgreSQL-focussed) at SlideShare. The 116 slides contain plenty of modern SQL idioms you likely haven't used before. Even if you're an experienced SQL developer the presentation is still worth checking out.

ZenQuery is now open source

Today I made ZenQuery available as open source (under the Apache License). ZenQuery is an 'Enterprise Backend as a Service' and allows you to easily access databases through a REST API without any programming knowledge required. Get SQL result sets as JSON, XML or CSV data, which can easily be processed by tools such as MS Excel or in your own applications. ZenQuery provides you with an instant REST API for your SQL queries. Anything that can be expressed by SELECT * FROM ...

Saturday December 20th, 2014 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Airtable – A true spreadsheet / database hybrid?

Lots of the software of the world is written in Microsoft's Excel. A spreadsheet environment lends itself particularly well to addressing everyday computing problems. Compiling tabular data, creating connections between particular pieces of that data, condensing and aggregating over a dataset's values. These are common tasks a spreadsheet solves very well with no need for complex database or application server software. A spreadsheet is a flexible tool that provides simple, responsive and instant feedback to data input and algorithm changes. However flexible, ...

Sunday November 9th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

ZenQuery 1.0 is available today!

A few weeks ago I wrote about a new product I'm currently developing: ZenQuery, an Enterprise Backend as a Service. I’m pleased to announce the first public version of ZenQuery today. Since the first public announcement regarding ZenQuery roughly 30 days ago we’ve been busy working on this release. Today, you’ll be able to try out ZenQuery 1.0 yourselves on your own server and environment. I really hope you like what we’ve got for you so far. For more information please have a ...

Wednesday May 21st, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Web Applications

ZenQuery: From Idea To Product In 2 Weeks

Earlier this week I've launched a new product called ZenQuery. In a nutshell, ZenQuery is an application that creates an instant REST API (with JSON, XML and CSV formats) for SQL queries. This allows you to easily access any kind of data from your database without having to deal with technical details such as database drivers, connections, ORM or caching. A typical use case is an enterprise company which for example wants to create a new mobile application. The data needed for such ...

Sunday April 27th, 2014 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann