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.

A Collection Of Common UX Myths

UX Myths is website on common UX misconceptions like "The homepage is your most important page", "You are like your users" or "Icons enhance usability". The authors shed light on where those myths come from, why they're wrong and what can be done to improve your design process in each case.

JSCity – Code Complexity Visualization For JavaScript Codebases

JSCity is a tool for visualising JavaScript source code complexity that uses the CodeCity metaphor. This approach makes use of the building blocks of modern cities for visualising the building blocks of software. Since in JavaScript functional programming is the predominant programming paradigm JSCity represents code artefacts like this: folders are districts files are sub-districts functions are buildings inner functions are represented as buildings on the top of their nested function / building This for example is the visualisation of the AngularJS source code. JSCity even allows you ...

Sunday November 27th, 2016 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Mockito 2 now available

Last week version 2.1.0 of the Mockito testing framework for Java has been released. For more information on this latest iteration check out this page. As the name suggests, Mockito allows you to mock object behaviour during unit tests. When writing unit tests you only want to test a particular unit's behaviour (hence the name). Depending on the programming language used such a unit might be a function, a procedure or - most commonly in today's object-oriented programming environments - a ...

Sunday October 16th, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Code means communication

Writing software is all about communication. Code is a way of conveying the meaning of natural language requirements in an exact manner so that computers can make sense of the intentions of our fickle human minds and the often ambiguous ways we tend to express ourselves in. So, in that respect software development amounts to translating human concepts and notions into a language machines can understand. However, communicating with machines is only one, more technical aspect, of writing software. The by far more important ...

Sunday August 21st, 2016 by Bjoern in Software

Christopher Murphy: Time + Creativity

In this beyond tellerrand talk designer Christopher Murphy emphasizes the importance of procrastination and reserving time for experimentation and endeavours not directly related to a specific goal at hand: Time + Creativity - Christopher Murphy - btconfDUS 2016 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. While procrastination usually is seen as something negative - and in most cases rightfully so - setting aside time for a free flow of thoughts and ideas that's not immediately purpose-driven is an essential part of any creative process ...

Sunday July 17th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Tracking Down Software Bugs, Automatically!

Last week MIT researchers published an article about an automatic bug-repair system called Prophet. Prophet is a machine-learning system that learns general properties and patterns of successful error corrections in software and applies those patterns to making new error corrections in other programs. While the possibility of having software track down and fix bugs automatically (which effectively would mean creating self-correcting computer programs) is exciting enough in its own right, Prophet possibly has far-reaching implications for verifying the general correctness of code ...

Sunday February 7th, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Software, Web Applications

Internal, company-specific software frameworks are evil

OK, I'm exaggerating a little here, company-specific software frameworks aren't exactly evil as in the true definition of the word but who isn't fond of the occasional hyperbolic headline? What I'm trying get across is that most of the times, software frameworks developed within an organization specifically for solving that organization's business problems in a reusable, maintainable manner do more harm than good. Everybody who's been exposed to enterprise software development for longer than a very brief period has come across them in ...

Sunday January 24th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Software

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 ...

Sunday October 4th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Entrepreneurship, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

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 - ...

Sunday December 14th, 2014 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.