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.

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 ...

UI Design Patterns

UI Patterns is an extensive library of user interface design patterns by Danish web developer Anders Toxboe. This website is a collection of tried-and-tested best practices in UI design. Although the site focusses on web applications and websites most of its practices apply to user-facing software in general. Best practices and design patterns allow us to draw upon proven methods - of user interaction in this case - instead of having to re-invent the wheel (which itself is an anti-pattern) each ...

Sunday March 20th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web Applications

Anna Debenham @ Fronteers 2015: Front-end Style Guides

At last year's Fronteers Conference in Amsterdam freelance front-end developer Anna Debenham talked about front-end style guides. If you've ever heard about Pattern Lab and Atomic Design - which frankly you should've if your doing anything front-end on the web - this is what this talk is about: Anna Debenham - Front-end Style Guides from Fronteers on Vimeo. Anna presents the various kinds of style guides and style guide frameworks available and shows some real life examples of actual company style guides ...

Sunday January 17th, 2016 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web Applications

Chris Heilmann @ Fronteers 2015: Of Gaps, Fillers and Empty Spaces

At the Fronteers Conference in Amsterdam in October 2015 developer / evangelist Chris Heilmann gave a talk about our desire as web developers to innovate ever faster, mostly motivated by our feeling that - despite the drive to implement an ever increasing number of software products as web applications - browsers and the web as a platform can't yet compete with native platforms (specifically mobile ones) in many respects, to which belong for example: UI responsiveness, native look-and-feel and simple use ...

Sunday January 3rd, 2016 by Bjoern in Business, Front End Development, Software, Web, Web Applications

Stephanie Rieger – The Emerging Global Web

In this presentation Stephanie Rieger talks about how the web is accessed and used in emerging economies in Africa and Asia and why mobile plays a dominant role in developing countries: Stephanie Rieger – The Emerging Global Web – beyond tellerrand DÜSSELDORF 2015 from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo. From a developed economy point of view this is very intriguing. Though mobile devices already dominate the market in developed economies and mobile-first is the dominant design approach for new websites and apps in ...

Sunday October 25th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Web, Web Applications

Jeremy Keith – Enhance!

Much in line with the talk about advancing the web without breaking it in his talk at beyond tellerrand this year Jeremy Keith argues for the benefits of starting with simple solutions to the problem at hand and building upon a solid foundation instead of giving in to the temptation starting out with ever more complex layers upon layers of complex tools and frameworks. Jeremy advocates progressive enhancement, that is making content accessible to every platform and browser while still using the ...

Sunday September 27th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Web, Web Applications

Christian Heilmann – Advancing the web without breaking it?

Web development today is characterized by a constant, rapid flow of new frameworks, CSS preprocessors, task runners, package managers, asset pipelines ... Angular, Ember.js, Backbone, React, Flux, Grunt, Gulp. Every week or so it seems there's a new JavaScript framework that does everything better than everything else before. We need to jump ship ever more frequently if we want to keep up and stay on the bleeding edge. There's constant bickering about which framework is better and which framework du jour ...

Sunday September 20th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Mobile Applications, Web, Web Applications

PPK – The Plural of Chromium is Chromia

He's the ultimate browser nerd. Peter-Paul Koch - commonly referred to as PPK - tests browsers and browser compatibilities so we don't have to. On his website QuirksMode he publishes articles and browser compatibility tables for each and every HTML5, CSS and JavaScript feature in the West. In his recent talk at beyond tellerrand he talked specifically about the mobile web and mobile web browsers in particular. Although the most dominant mobile platforms Android and iOS by and large both use WebKit-based ...

Sunday September 13th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web, Web Applications

Sara Wachter-Boettcher: Content Amid Chaos

At beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf earlier this year content strategy consultant Sara Wachter-Boettcher talked about Content Amid Chaos. Large organizations are inherently messy places often governed by office politics, arcane processes and design-by-committee. How do we deal with distributed, scattered content? How do we design for cluttered environments? How can we embrace such environments and devise content strategies that accommodate these organizational characteristics? In her talk Sara tries to give answers to these questions:

Sunday August 30th, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Web

Dave Shea: A Brief History of Web Design

At beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2015 David Shea, creator of the seminal website CSS Zen Garden gave a talk about the history of web design. David Shea takes us back on a - somewhat nostalgic - journey 25 years back to remind us about nigh forgotten websites and services (does anybody still remember Hotmail and GeoCities?). There are lessons to be learned from those early incarnations of web design and mistakes to be avoided. Moreover, and quite interestingly many concepts and techniques we ...

Sunday August 23rd, 2015 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Web

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.