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.

Lösung für die COVID-19 Pandemie: Schnelltests als Zugangsberechtigung

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Contrary to my usual writing habits the remainder of this post will be in German. The reason for this is that although the subject most certainly is of interest to everyone the specifics of the solution outlined in the following mostly apply to the current COVID-19 situation in Germany and my personal experience with that situation. The article therefore is mostly relevant to a German audience. If you're interested in discussing the potential for ...

Thursday February 18th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Software, Web Applications

Five Articles on Software Quality and Design Patterns

This week I'd like to point you to five articles I previously posted on this blog and from which I think that they're as relevant as they were at the time. The first three are about general software design principles, software architecture and software quality while the final two refer to specific best practices and common design patterns for Angular: Writing Disposable Code, Not Reusable Code (November 06, 2016) What Causes Over-engineering and How Can You Prevent It? (April 16, 2017) Less Is More ...

Sunday January 24th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Latency by The Radiophonic Workshop

On the 22nd of November, the electronic music pioneers of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop (of "Doctor Who" theme music fame, amongst others) performed a unique piece of music called 'Latency', in which they make clever use of network latency to create a musical loop. Each of the musicians involved sequentially played his part in a loop. The result then was sent via the Internet to the next musician at another location, who in turn built upon what had been played until ...

Sunday December 13th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design, Music, Web

The Laws of UX

For a discipline that's commonly seen as being mostly fuelled by creativity rather than being particularly rule-governed, principles, maxims, and laws seem to abound in the world of design. This perception of design being about creativity, first and foremost, rather than deliberate thought is a naïve and superficial one, though. Design of course has always been about principles and constraints, Dieter Rams' famous Ten principles for good design being a particularly good example. UX designer Jon Yablonski created Laws of UX, where he ...

Sunday November 29th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Tools for Working With CSS Grid Layouts and Flexbox

CSS Grid Layout and CSS Flexible Box Layout, commonly known as Flexbox, are powerful techniques for implementing flexible grid and column- or row-based layouts with CSS. These two techniques enable designers and web developers to accurately and fluidly position elements and content on web pages and web applications. While Flexbox (see A Complete Guide to Flexbox by CSS-Tricks) predominantly works along a single principal dimension, called the main axis or flex direction (either row or column), and therefore essentially is a one-dimensional ...

Sunday November 22nd, 2020 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Objectified – A Documentary About Industrial Design

Objectified, the second part of Gary Hustwit's Design Trilogy, deals with industrial design and examines the design of everyday objects and the life and work of the people that design them. Just like Helvetica, the first part of the trilogy, the film is largely done in an interview format and features conversations with highly acclaimed industrial designers such as Jonathan Ive, IDEO co-founder Bill Moggridge, and the legendary Dieter Rams.

Sunday October 25th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design

Helvetica – A Documentary About a Typeface

Helvetica by director Gary Hustwit is a documentary film about the eponymous Helvetica typeface and typography and visual design in general. Using Helvetica's simple elegance, usefulness, and ubiquity as both a starting point and a recurring theme, this documentary film features interviews with many design and typography legends and luminaries such as Jonathan Hoefler, Erik Spiekermann, or Tobias Frere-Jones. In those interviews, those typographers share their opinions on what made Helvetica so wildly successful, why it is the iconic typeface of the modern ...

Sunday October 18th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design

Two Hard Things in Computer Science

I've always liked Jeff Atwood's variation on Phil Karlton's original quote "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.": There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. However, with reactive programming these days this version by Dave Stagner probably is even more appropriate (especially since it uses zero-based numbering, which of course is the only decent way of indexing elements in a sequence ...): 0) Cache invalidation 1) Naming things 5) Asynchronous callbacks 2) ...

Sunday October 11th, 2020 by Bjoern in Software

Improving Developer UX

Software engineer and data scientist Gabriel Pickard recently has published an article about developer experience being fundamentally harder than normal UX. He defines developer experience as the user experience of the tools software developers use in order to do their job: code editors IDEs command-line tools Gabriel identifies these main aspects in which in his opinion developer tools are failing their users: Counter to any UI/UX philosophy, as programmers we find ourselves maintaining vast background knowledge about the structure and dynamics of our programs, with nary a ...

Sunday April 26th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Reprise: Petro Salema – Storyteller Extraordinaire

Almost five years ago I wrote about a talk given by Petro Salema at that year's edition of beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf: Petro Salema – Designing Interfaces That Think @ beyond tellerrand Düssedorf 2015 A common advice given regarding talks and presentations, especially ones of a more technical variety, is to not just talk about technical details but to tell a story. While this piece of advice is good and well-intentioned it's not usually exemplified or specified in any more detail. Steve Jobs is ...

Sunday April 12th, 2020 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Software, Web, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.