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.

Push Notifications with Amazon MQ – Sample From “Stratospheric – From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS”

The following is an excerpt from the chapter on "Push Notifications with Amazon MQ" 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. Push Notifications With Amazon MQ As discussed in the chapter "Sharing Todos with SQS and SES" we might want to share our Todos with others. Being able to share Todos is already quite helpful for working on tasks ...

Blogumentation Revisited

Some time ago I wrote about a process called "blogumentation": Derived from the insight that arguably the best way to learn something and to internalise knowledge is to write about it and to try and explain that knowledge to others, blogumentation essentially means writing about a subject matter (e.g. a solution to a particular programming problem or a new practice you've just learned about) that you consider worth documenting and publishing the result. It means that instead of documenting something just for ...

May 9, 2021 by Bjoern in Software

CORS: What It Is and How It Works

Expanding on last week's article on best practices for REST API Design I'd like to point to a specific aspect working REST APIs frequently entails: A browser security feature called "Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)". This feature allows you to define which resources provided by a web application are supposed to be accessible from which origin, which in turn typically is comprised of protocol, host / domain name and port. This website's origin for example is https://bjoernkw.com:80 (port 80 is the default port ...

May 2, 2021 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

REST API Design: Best Practices

It's probably safe to say that REST (REpresentational State Transfer - originally described by Roy Fielding) is the most widely used architectural pattern when it comes to APIs in web application contexts. From statelessness, to self-descriptive messages, and hypermedia as the engine of application state (HATEOAS) REST comes with quite a few principles, constraints, patterns, and flavours, not all of which are used or applied consistently with each REST API. REST often is a rather loosely-applied architectural pattern or a continuum, on ...

April 25, 2021 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Stratospheric – Almost in Orbit: Three More Chapters Available

Last week, we released the fourth version of of our eBook "Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS"! Again, about two months have passed since the last release in February 2021. We hope that you like the new content we've been working on during that time. These are the new chapters you'll get with the latest update: Building a Continuous Deployment Pipeline: Software delivery performance is highly correlated with organizational performance, so we'll want to deploy often. That means ...

April 18, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

A Simple Yet Powerful Tool: Decision Tables

Decision tables are a tool for specifying which actions to perform given a number of conditions. They represent business logic in terms of rules for connecting actions with required conditions for those actions. While they might appear deceptively simple and trivial they can be a tremendously powerful tool for defining business logic and certain types of software requirements. This article on Decision Table Patterns by Hillel Wayne describes the general concept as well as patterns, techniques, and best practices for using decision ...

April 11, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Cloudcraft – Cloud Architecture Diagrams and Visualisations

After recently having written about AWS cloud visualisation and management tools such as CloudMapper and Vantage I was made aware of yet another such tool by Sebastian Reuße: Cloudcraft allows you to not only visualise your AWS cloud architecture with beautiful as well as somewhat playful isometric infrastructure diagrams reminiscent of turn-based strategy games but also provides live connectivity with your actual AWS infrastructure and so-called "smart" components. Using these features you don't have to manually draw and recreate your existing infrastructure in ...

April 4, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Vantage – A Unified AWS Console

In last week's blog post I casually mentioned that out-of-the-box with AWS there's no single unified console providing you with an overview of your deployed infrastructure. Thankfully, there's Vantage - a centralized dashboard that provides you with such an overview and cost transparency across AWS regions and accounts through views, global search, and actionable insights. Up to $500 in monthly AWS spend Vantage is free. Beyond that there are Pro and Business plans at a monthly price of $50 and $250, respectively.

March 28, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

CloudMapper: An AWS Visualisation Tool

CloudMapper is an AWS visualisation tool that's highly useful for getting an overview of your AWS infrastructure and network setup. Depending on the number of services, instances, VPCs, and subnets used, getting lost is quite easy, especially when considering that out-of-the-box with AWS there's no single unified console from which to get an overview of your deployed resources but rather a multitude of consoles, one for each AWS service. Therefore, keeping track of your infrastructure and keeping your costs in check can be ...

March 21, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, General, Software, Web Applications

Beautiful Presentation of Code Snippets

In case you need to document and present source code and would like to do so in a visually appealing manner these tools might come in handy: Ray.so Carbon Source Code Shots With Ray.so being the most recent one and arguably also the one with the most stylish output, all of those generate decent-looking images of your source code snippets for embedding into documentation, blog posts, or eBooks, for example.

March 14, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.