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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.

Jenny Shen: UX Design Across Different Cultures

UX designer Jenny Shen recently has been featured on the Scott Hanselman's podcast with her work on UX design across different cultures. She's published a two-part summary of her experiences with cross-cultural design and internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) of websites and applications: UX Design Across Different Cultures — Part 1 UX Design Across Different Cultures — Part 2 These articles shed light on how distributing an application or publishing a website in another country not only requires translating the content and labels of UI elements but also has ...

Regular Languages Are … well … Regular

A few weeks ago I came across an article describing "A regular expression to check for prime numbers". I was intrigued because processes defined by formal regular languages have an inherently linear runtime while the process described is non-linear. This contradicts the definition of regular languages, specifically the Pumping Lemma. So, how is this even possible? Well, the regular expression discussed in this article and the regex framework it's used with makes clever use of backtracking for realizing this 'magic'. Quite simply, the ...

Sunday March 15th, 2015 by Bjoern in Software

i18n is a hard and largely unsolved problem

After last week's post about the intricacies of dealing with date and time representations in software I promised to write about another seemingly simple yet surprisingly complex area of software development: Internationalization. Some time ago a I wrote about an interesting presentation on i18n and localization in Rails by Heather Rivers of Yammer. If you're in any way dealing with internationalization (i18n) and localization (L10n) of software (which you basically should if you're into software development) have a look at the video of ...

Sunday June 30th, 2013 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Web Applications

Presentation on i18n and Crowdsourcing Localization in Rails

Linguistic Potluck: Crowdsourcing Localization in Rails by Heather Rivers of Yammer is a great presentation on the intricacies of web app internationalization, its linguistic implications and some awesome solutions to the most common i18n-related issues.

Sunday February 10th, 2013 by Bjoern in Web Applications