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.

Working Across Timezones in Remote Work Settings and Distributed Environments

When working in a distributed environment or remote work environment, as is increasingly - and quite fortunately - becoming the default for knowledge workers, and the software industry in particular, chances are, rather sooner than later you'll be collaborating across timezones. I'm currently collaborating with people from EDT, GMT, CEST, MYT, JST, and AEST timezones, for instance. Asynchronous communication is crucial in a remote work setting already when no time differences are involved. It becomes absolutely vital when people from different timezones depend ...

Sunday May 30th, 2021 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship, Software

My Remote Work Setup

I've been a proponent of remote work, new ways of work and different approaches to work culture and the opportunities and options those provide for a long time. While 2019 arguably was the year when remote work finally caught on for more than just a select few, 2020 most definitely was the year when remote work really took off - for obvious reasons. I'd like to quickly share some of the tools and components from my current setup, in terms of both specific ...

Sunday February 14th, 2021 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship, Software

GitLive – Real-time Code Collaboration

Continuing on last week's subject of better collaboration and knowledge sharing in software development (with CodeStream, in that case) I'd like to share GitLive - a new, promising tool I've come across. GitLive allows you and your fellow team members to collaborate on code in real time right in your IDE thereby turning it "into a collaborative space". What I've seen so far looks intriguing. I think that we'll be moving into that direction more rapidly and that we'll see more tools of ...

Sunday September 20th, 2020 by Bjoern in Software

CodeStream – Code as a Knowledge Base

CodeStream is a code review tool that allows you to conduct such reviews right in your IDE, i.e. without changing context. According to their master plan CodeStream is supposed to "Provide the ability to talk about any block of code, on any branch, in any state [...]" "Eliminate context switching costs [...]" "Treat codeblocks as a first-class object [...]" in order to allow developers, both new and senior ones, to quickly get up to speed with an existing codebase and to collaborate and draw upon each ...

Sunday September 13th, 2020 by Bjoern in Software

Remote Team Collaboration: Remote Desktop Solutions

The tools I wrote about in previous posts on remote team collaboration serve specific tasks or help with particular parts of workflows. They all run on existing hardware and infrastructure, though. If, however, you want to get rid of a dependency on specific hardware entirely, remote desktop solutions are a viable approach. Remote desktop products allow you to run a virtual desktop and workspace on a remote server. Of course you still need a local machine to connect to that workspace but ...

Sunday July 12th, 2020 by Bjoern in Software

Remote Team Collaboration: tmate – Instant terminal sharing

While there are quite a few options for collaborating visually in a remote work setting and remote desktop solutions are ten a penny there are surprisingly few options for instant live collaboration in text-based environments, i.e. terminals or command-line interfaces. One such option for instant terminal sharing is tmate. tmate for instance allows you to have remote pair programming sessions via the terminal or work collaboratively on a command-line interface. It achieves this by returning a connection string such as ssh [email protected]. This ...

Sunday July 5th, 2020 by Bjoern in Software

Remote Team Collaboration: Whiteboards With Google Jamboard

Two weeks ago I wrote about working collaboratively on digital whiteboards with Miro. Since 2017 Google has been selling competitively priced digital whiteboard hardware under its Jamboard brand. Alongside that hardware product, however, with Google Jamboard there's a companion software product of the same name as part of Google's G Suite collection of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools. Although Jamboard, the software, isn't widely promoted as an independent software product it works perfectly fine as a browser app without the Jamboard hardware. While not ...

Sunday June 21st, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software

Remote Team Collaboration: Appointment Scheduling With Calendly

Calendly is an online appointment scheduling tool that allows you, your team, or your entire organisation to flexibly schedule meetings. As a user you can define available time slots and allow others to schedule meetings according to these time slots. Calendly taps into your usual online calendar tool (e.g. Google Calendar, Office 365 / Outlook, or iCloud). Instead of the usual back and forth though that commonly happens when trying to agree on an exact time and date for an appointment Calendly ...

Sunday June 14th, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software

Remote Team Collaboration: Whiteboards With Miro

Miro is a collaborative whiteboard software that's ideal for exploring ideas and concepts in a distributed work setting. Much like a physical whiteboard it lends itself to ideation, brainstorming, design and planning sessions, i.e. work where the structure and nature of the outcome isn't necessarily known beforehand but rather freeform and loosely structured and the process by which these results are generated isn't particularly rigid. Miro provides the user with elements and tools such as sticky notes, freeform drawing, mind maps, grids, and ...

Sunday June 7th, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software

Remote Team Collaboration: Interactive Presentations With Mentimeter

Continuing on my recent theme of remote team collaboration tools, today I'd like to suggest Mentimeter. Mentimeter is an interactive online presentation tool that allows you to engage with and gather feedback from meeting attendees, workshop participants, or team mates. Where with ordinary presentation tools your captive audience can just watch and listen, Mentimenter enables event organisers to collect feedback, keep everyone engaged, and make sure everyone's voice is heard. In addition to the ordinary content slides one would expect from presentation software, ...

Sunday May 31st, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.