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.

Stratospheric – Three New Chapters!

Last week, we released the 3rd iteration of our eBook Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS. Roughly two months have passed since the last release in December 2020. We hope that we've made good use of this time by adding a few more chapters, as well as by improving and "refactoring" some of the already existing content. The latest release contains these new chapters: Designing a Deployment Project with CDK: Building upon our First Steps with CDK we'll go ...

(Deutsch) 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 ...

February 18, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Entrepreneurship, Mobile Applications, Software, Web Applications

My Remote Work Setup

I've been a proponent of remote work, new ways of work and different approaches to work culture and the opportunities and options those provide for a long time. While 2019 arguably was the year when remote work finally caught on for more than just a select few, 2020 most definitely was the year when remote work really took off - for obvious reasons. I'd like to quickly share some of the tools and components from my current setup, in terms of both specific ...

February 14, 2021 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship, Software

Material-UI Builder: Generating a React / Material-UI Codebase

Material-UI is a widely used UI component framework for React based on Google's Material Design design system. These frameworks and systems simplify and streamline the development of consistent user interfaces for web applications. Material-UI Builder is drag & drop online editor that allows you to choose from a wide range of Material-UI components for your application, customise the CSS styles applied to them, and export a ready-to-use codebase based on those preferences.

February 7, 2021 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Big O Notation Explained

Conrad Reeves recently published an article on Big O notation on That Computer Scientist, in which he tries to explain this - seemingly daunting - subject as easily as possible. Big O notation is a method for ranking an algorithm's efficiency in terms of time (e.g. CPU cycles) or space (i.e. storage or memory) requirements. In a nutshell, Big O notation allows you to make rough approximations like for example: "In a best case scenario the algorithm in question at most will ...

January 31, 2021 by Bjoern in Software

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 ...

January 24, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Image Compression Utility: Squoosh

When working with images on web applications and websites optimising images and reducing their download size is a quick win in terms of optimising page and app load times. There are plenty of image compression utilities out there - both web apps and tools for local installation. Recently, I've tried out several of those again because I wanted to reduce the overall load time of this website and according to website audit tools such as Lighthouse image sizes definitely was an area ...

January 17, 2021 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web, Web Applications

Managing Permissions with IAM – Sample From “Stratospheric – From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS”

The following is an excerpt from the chapter on "Managing Permissions with IAM" from the eBook "Stratospheric – From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS" I'm currently writing together with Tom Hombergs and Philip Riecks. You can get the eBook over at Leanpub. Managing Permissions with IAM When deploying applications to a cloud service such as AWS, reliable security concepts are key. After all, we not only want to protect our users' data but also make sure that security within our organization ...

January 10, 2021 by Bjoern in General

Second Version of Stratospheric – From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS

Two weeks ago, we released the second version of our eBook "Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS". This release contains these new chapters on IAM, local development, and automated deployments: Managing Permissions with IAM - this chapter gives an overview of the concepts we can use with AWS in order to secure our resources and to authorize both individuals and applications to access them. Local Development Setup - this chapter explains how we can develop our cloud-based Todo application ...

January 3, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

2020 in Live Gigs

I'm an avid music fan and concert-goer. As mentioned in last week's post I'd like to write a bit about live music events in 2020. For obvious reasons, 2020 has both been a very different and a very difficult year for live events and those that make a living from them: Artists and performers, speakers, conferences, festival, venues, sound engineers, sound and lighting technicians, caterers, stage hands. These were the only bands I was able to see during on-location live music shows ...

December 27, 2020 by Bjoern in Entrepreneurship, Music

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.