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.

Dan Bricklin – Inventor of the Electronic Spreadsheet

Today startup entrepreneurs are celebrated for disrupting industries and changing the world. Marc Andreessen is famously quoted with the statement "Software is eating the world!". Back in the days when software was nothing but a nascent industry, Dan Bricklin both changed the world with software, disrupted not one industry but several at the same time and in fact almost single-handedly created the industry of small business software. His name nowadays isn't exactly well known as is the software he created. The new ...

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

Spucke, Klebeband und COBOL

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Kürzlich brauchte ich eine Kopie eines bestimmten Kontoauszuges für mein Geschäftskonto. Naiv nahm ich an, dass dies einfach per Online Banking zu erledigen wäre. Leider fehlt eine entsprechende Option im Online Banking System meiner Bank, also rief ich bei der Telefon Hotline an. Dort wollte man mir dann auch in der Tat direkt weiter helfen, benötigte aber das Endsaldo des vorherigen Auszugs, das Anfangssaldo des folgenden Auszugs und den Monat des Auszugs, von dem ich ...

Sunday June 22nd, 2014 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software

Surrounded By Idiots?

This week a video called 'The Expert' (based the short story "The Meeting" by Alexey Berezin) was spread by a CNET article aptly titled 'This is how an engineer feels when he's surrounded by idiots': I think most engineers can relate to this situation. However, the real question remains: Why do engineers time and time again find themselves in such Dilbertesque situations. Is it really because we're surrounded by idiots, nitwits and PHBs? Perhaps, but this is only a small part of the ...

Sunday April 6th, 2014 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Software

Self Licking Ice Cream Cones

Chris Granger of LightTable fame has posted an insightful article on how better programming tools might come about. He argues that 'programming should be about solving problems' and that ideally 'programming is our way of encoding thought such that the computer can help us with it' but along the way we - as programmers - somehow lost these notions and in our daily work we predominantly deal with marginal problems, problems which are incidental to the problem we were trying to solve ...

Sunday March 30th, 2014 by Bjoern in Software

MemoEasy – Termine online buchen

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Terminausfälle sind für viele Unternehmen ein erhebliches Problem. Ärzte, Friseure, Versicherungsmakler - für diese Dienstleister und in vielen weiteren Branchen läuft ein Großteil des Geschäftes über vorab vereinbarte Termine ab. Nicht wahr genommene Termine sind daher nicht nur ärgerlich, sondern führen auch zu teils erheblichen Umsatzeinbußen. Solche Umsatzausfälle müssen dann erst einmal wieder aufgefangen werden. Ausgefallene Termine können kurzfristig nicht wieder neu vergeben werden. Oft werden Termine einfach deswegen nicht wahr genommen, weil Kunden ...

Tuesday September 3rd, 2013 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship, Web Applications

The World Runs On Excel

There's been a lot of talk lately about the importance of Excel and that Excel is everywhere. I'd even go as far as saying that most of the world in one way or another runs on Excel. Excel in my opinion is the best piece of software Microsoft has made so far (other people seem to agree with me, by the way). While Microsoft didn't invent the spreadsheet - that credit goes to VisiCalc and IBM with Lotus 1-2-3 - they were ...

Saturday February 16th, 2013 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Björn Wilmsmann