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 German.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

Admiral Grace Hopper Explains the Nanosecond

Grace Hopper was a brilliant computer scientist, who - among numerous other achievements throughout her career in mathematics and computer science, the military, and the at the time nascent software business - can be credited with having had a pivotal role in the development of the business programming language COBOL (which quite deservedly got her the nickname Grandma COBOL and which in turn gave rise to enterprise software and the enterprise software industry) This is her visually explaining what a nanosecond ...

Sunday September 6th, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Repost from 16 June 2020: COVID-19 Tracing App for Germany

Repost from 16 June 2020: German COVID-19 tracing app available now.

Sunday June 28th, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, General, Mobile Applications, Software

German COVID-19 Tracing App Available Now

Earlier today, the highly anticipated COVID-19 tracing app for Germany, called Corona-Warn-App, has been released. The iOS version is available on the App Store. The Android version can be downloaded at Google Play. The Corona-Warn-App is based on the DP3T (Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing) architecture and the joint specification by Apple and Google for privacy-preserving exposure notification, which implements this architecture as an API for official public health providers to draw upon. The app is developed and published as open source under the Apache ...

Tuesday June 16th, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, General, Mobile Applications, Software

Konrad Zuse: Not the most correct but the least complicated theories find practical application.

Not the most correct but the least complicated theories find practical application. - Konrad Zuse A translated quote from one of the inventors of computers and modern computer science I read last year under a bust of Zuse near Kleiner Tiergarten in Berlin this statement is more relevant today than ever. In software development in particular we often attempt to design solutions that cover each and every possible use case - however unlikely or even virtually non-existent that use case might be. ...

Sunday February 2nd, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Software

Boring Solutions Revisited: Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley

Dan McKinley's article on choosing boring solutions, although not exactly new anymore, has been a welcome reminder for me to revisit the topic of of using boring solutions and keeping things simple. Dan makes the point that "adding technology to your company comes with a cost" or as I stated in my own article on this subject: "The elephant in the room is: There’s an opportunity cost to everything." Most choices come with a trade-off. If you decide to use a technology for the ...

Sunday October 13th, 2019 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Software

The 5 Levels of Logging Explained by Orhan Kavrakoğlu

In this article Orhan Kavrakoğlu explains the logging levels commonly used in software alongside with some pertinent examples as well as recommendations and best practices such as in which case to use which particular log level and how to present them to the target audience (i.e. other developers, system administrators or DevOps people) so they get noticed in accordance with their respective importance and urgency. As mentioned here before seemingly trivial improvements such as providing better context in your log messages can ...

Sunday October 21st, 2018 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Artur Śmiarowski’s Guidelines for Writing Readable Code

Code means communication has become a bit of a mantra for me. Source code isn't just the means by which you translate requirements into commands and structures a machine can understand. Source code also communicates your intent as a designer and engineer as to what a particular piece of software is supposed to do. If written in a clear and comprehensible manner code can serve as an authoritative design specification with no or little extra documentation needed. I would go as far as ...

Sunday October 14th, 2018 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Keep it simple, stupid

As something of a follow-up on my article on using boring solutions from two weeks ago I'd like to point you to a blog post by Justin Etheredge, cofounder of software development company Simple Thread: Software Complexity Is Killing Us In this post Justin outlines in which ways software development has become easier in the past few decades and also points out the ways in which it hasn't. Most of the complexity of software applications accumulates in the layer that deals with business processes. ...

Sunday June 10th, 2018 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.