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.

Googling For Developers

I sometimes jokingly say: "I’m not a good programmer. I just know how to use Google effectively." When programming and being confronted with an unknown error, stack trace or a specific exception message I usually turn to Google in order to find out how other developers with similar problems previously approached these issues. While at face value this might sound easy this requires experience. You have to know enough about software development in general and the environment (language, framework, library, you name it ... Read more

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 ... Read more

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 ... Read more

Monetizing Open Source Software Is Still Hard

Some weeks ago the guys behind LocomotiveCMS - an open source CMS that's competing with Wordpress - published a sobering article on how they failed making a profit with open source software so far. Their model basically relies on building reputation from their open source work and benefit from community contributions to their software. Their revenue is generated from both doing consulting for LocomotiveCMS and selling hosting services in a SaaS package. Not too unusual a model. The harsh reality - however - ... Read more