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.

Reprise: Petro Salema – Storyteller Extraordinaire

Almost five years ago I wrote about a talk given by Petro Salema at that year's edition of beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf: Petro Salema – Designing Interfaces That Think @ beyond tellerrand Düssedorf 2015 A common advice given regarding talks and presentations, especially ones of a more technical variety, is to not just talk about technical details but to tell a story. While this piece of advice is good and well-intentioned it's not usually exemplified or specified in any more detail. Steve Jobs is ...

Don’t Just Document Software, Tell a Story.

Humans tend to remember stories much better than mere facts, which probably is why storytelling has such a long tradition in human history. Storyteller is - quoting from their own description - an "editor plugin that generates web pages that recreate and animate entire programming sessions" (see this playback repository for examples and the project's GitHub repository for more details). It's an interesting, novel take on software documentation in that instead of merely describing some current state of code and what it's supposed ...

Sunday March 29th, 2020 by Bjoern in Software

The Power of Metaphor – Mike Hill @ beyond tellerrand 2019

The Power of Metaphor - Mike Hill from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.

Sunday September 15th, 2019 by Bjoern in Design

Anjana Vakil @ RuhrJS 2017 – Immutable Data Structures for Functional JS

At RuhrJS 2017 Anjana Vakil gave a fascinating talk on immutable data structures for use with functional programming. This talk involves some great educational storytelling. Even if you've never had a computer science course on data structures and never entirely understood things like hashes, trees or tries, after having watched this talk you will!

Sunday January 14th, 2018 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Sarah Drasner @ beyond tellerrand 2017 – Storytelling in JavaScript

Sarah Drasner @ beyond tellerrand 2017: Storytelling in JavaScript – Sarah Drasner – btconfDUS2017 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.

Sunday July 16th, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web Applications

Espen Brunborg @ beyond tellerrand 2017 – The Secret Life of Comedy

Espen Brunborg @ beyond tellerrand 2017: The Secret Life of Comedy – Espen Brunborg – btconfDUS2017 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.

Sunday July 2nd, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Front End Development, Web, Web Applications

Petro Salema – Designing Interfaces That Think @ beyond tellerrand Düssedorf 2015

Earlier this year at beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2015 I had the privilege to attend a talk by Petro Salema. Petro shared his insights about today's limits in human computer interaction, attention span, mental bandwidth and how to address these issues. While the subject matter itself is interesting enough already I've never personally witnessed such rivetting storytelling before. He started his talk with a captivating story from his home country Tanzania about Bwakila, a machete-wielding madmen. This story nicely set the ground for the ...

Sunday August 16th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Software, Web, Web Applications

Greatness, luck and storytelling

Recently, I've done some reading on computer history again. If you're interested in that sort of stuff and haven't read it yet go and have a look at Ars Technica's in-depth series on the history of the Amiga home computer. It's quite a comprehensive piece on a significant part of computer history that's largely forgotten today. This series and other documents such Dave Haynie's Deathbed Vigil remind me of how far ahead the Amiga was in many respects at that time. I'm ...

Sunday June 15th, 2014 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.