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.

Design & Quantum Superposition

Last year, Hungarian designer Csongor Bartus published a thought-provoking article I've only recently come across. Quantum mechanics and design are two words you don't often see juxtaposed and probably rightfully so. No, I've not gone crazy and I'm not going to go down some weird esoteric "Quantum Design" rabbit hole here. However, Csongor borrows the term superposition from quantum mechanics as a metaphor for an interesting new angle on design for the web: To cut in, let's equip all content with all states ...

RunKit: Instant, reproducible JavaScript playgrounds

I'm a huge proponent of the idea that programming tools should directly interact with coding and provide immediate, responsive feedback to changes. RunKit is such a tool that offers a comprehensive JavaScript / Node.js prototyping environment. The service supplies you with instant, sandboxed Node.js instances called "notebooks" that allow you to experiment with the whole gamut of NPM modules. Moreover, "from graphs and maps to low level hexadecimal inspectors" RunKit offers data visualisations for immediate visual feedback. Once done you can showcase your ...

Sunday February 12th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Interactive Flowcharts with code2flow

Visualisation often helps immensely when trying to understand complex systems and interactions. Visualising these systems and their behaviour can be a daunting task though: Covering each and every path a workflow or process might take can be quite arduous. In many cases it's not even possible to comprehensively describe a system that has not yet been implemented. Edge cases frequently only tend to surface once a software has been tried out under real conditions. Software in turn needs to adapt quickly, which all ...

Sunday December 18th, 2016 by Bjoern in Software

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.

Sunday December 4th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

UI Movement

UI Movement is a website that showcases user interface designs on a daily basis as an inspiration for your own designs. The designs itself are mostly sourced from Dribbble - the show and tell site for designers. Originally just a newsletter in the vein of an MVP, UI Movement has developed into a fully-fledged website with designs organised in categories such as commerce, dashboard or menu.

Sunday October 23rd, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Less Is More

What's true for design in general certainly is true for software design in particular: Less is more - or paraphrasing Dieter Rams - "Write less software in order to write better software." A few weeks ago I read this interesting article by web accessibility consultant Heydon Pickering. In this blog post he argues that the only foolproof way of writing performant web applications is to write less code. Sure, all that fancy minification, transpiling, JIT / AoT compilation and optimisation stuff might ...

Sunday October 2nd, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Explorable Explanations And A Reactive Document IDE

It's no secret I'm a fan of Bret Victor's work and the notion that programming tools should interact with coding and provide immediate, responsive feedback to changes. Recently, I've come across two intriguing projects / products that both draw upon this idea: Carbide (currently available as an early alpha version) is a new kind of JavaScript IDE that both immediately visualises the result of code changes and allows you to manipulate and visually interact with your code using UI controls such as sliders. Explorable ...

Sunday September 25th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web

Cracking the Code – David Jonathan Ross

At this year's beyond tellerrand typeface designer David Jonathan Ross gave an interesting talk about the typography of programming, including its history and the design rationale behind monospace fonts, in his own words hitting the sweet spot that is the nerd trifecta of history, programming and fonts: Cracking the Code - David Jonathan Ross - btconfDUS 2016 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. The talk contains a lot of intriguing insights into why programming fonts are designed the way they are, what UX ...

Sunday July 24th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Why motion matters in UI design

UI designer Craig Dehner wrote this interesting article about why he thinks motion design is the future. I wouldn't necessarily use such grandiose terms but essentially I agree: Motion design might not be THE future but it'll certainly play a vital role in current and future user interfaces. It took operating systems and browsers some time to be able to display smooth, seemingly natural animation (using CSS3 animations in the latter case). Now that animation is a staple of modern UI frameworks and ...

Sunday May 8th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Web Applications

A design rationale for Tube stations

In December 2015, Transport for London published the London Underground Station Design Idiom - design and user experience guidelines for London Underground stations, if you will. Ranging from their consistent usage of the Johnston typeface, to the iconic roundel and - of course - the equally iconic Tube map, which constitutes a design feat in its own right, TfL always had a strong foundation in design thinking. London Underground stations from very different eras and styles - Victorian, Art Deco, as well as ...

Sunday May 1st, 2016 by Bjoern in Design

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.