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.

GitLive – Real-time Code Collaboration

Continuing on last week's subject of better collaboration and knowledge sharing in software development (with CodeStream, in that case) I'd like to share GitLive - a new, promising tool I've come across. GitLive allows you and your fellow team members to collaborate on code in real time right in your IDE thereby turning it "into a collaborative space". What I've seen so far looks intriguing. I think that we'll be moving into that direction more rapidly and that we'll see more tools of ...

CodeStream – Code as a Knowledge Base

CodeStream is a code review tool that allows you to conduct such reviews right in your IDE, i.e. without changing context. According to their master plan CodeStream is supposed to "Provide the ability to talk about any block of code, on any branch, in any state [...]" "Eliminate context switching costs [...]" "Treat codeblocks as a first-class object [...]" in order to allow developers, both new and senior ones, to quickly get up to speed with an existing codebase and to collaborate and draw upon each ...

September 13, 2020 by Bjoern in Software

Admiral Grace Hopper Explains the Nanosecond

Grace Hopper was a brilliant computer scientist, who - among numerous other achievements throughout her career in mathematics and computer science, the military, and the at the time nascent software business - can be credited with having had a pivotal role in the development of the business programming language COBOL (which quite deservedly got her the nickname Grandma COBOL and which in turn gave rise to enterprise software and the enterprise software industry) This is her visually explaining what a nanosecond ...

September 6, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

AWS 101 – A Teaser: What to Expect and When

This past three months I have been working with fellow software developers and tech bloggers Tom Hombergs and Philip Riecks on a new project called AWS 101. So far and for the most part, we've been flying under the radar (the project is developed in the open though, see below) but the time has come to give you a little information about what to expect from this. The basic idea behind AWS 101 is to provide software developers and businesses with basic templates, ...

August 30, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

sdras/awesome-actions: A Curated List of Useful GitHub Actions

As a follow-up to last week's post on automating software maintenance tasks with GitHub Actions I'd like to point you to Awesome Actions, a curated list of resources related to GitHub Actions. The list includes both predefined actions you can directly use and resources for getting started with building your own actions and workflows, as well as various utilities for testing, linting and security purposes.

August 23, 2020 by Bjoern in Software

Using GitHub Actions for Automating Angular Updates

I've published quite a few Angular applications under various open source (MIT and Apache License, respectively) licenses : GDPR Transparency PivotHelper TimeSheets3 Among other responsibilities, maintaining software comes with the task of regularly checking for dependency updates and applying them to the software in question. This first and foremost involves security updates but also bug fixes and new features for the frameworks and libraries used by the application. Fortunately, Angular CLI comes with a command that allows you to do just that: ng update However, while having a ...

August 16, 2020 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software

Emergency Remote – A Guide to “Winning” Remote Work

These days, there's certainly no shortage of remote work guides, how-tos and tools - and rightfully so: Remote work has made sense since before 2020 and in the future it'll be the new default for many industries. Emergency Remote is another more recent take on how to quickly implement a productive remote work environment that focuses on actionable measures with immediate benefits and using the changes required as an opportunity for improving your company's overall processes and work environment: Emergency Remote is for ...

August 9, 2020 by Bjoern in General

Fetching Incoming Invoices in an Automated Fashion With Puppeteer

Like I said in 2016, accounting is still a manual and tedious process. However, since then I've made quite some headway, especially with regard to automatically fetching and storing incoming invoices. By now, all of those thankfully arrive via email, which allows me to have Zapier automatically fetch them and store attached invoice PDFs in the appropriate folders in Google Drive. One particular, lasting pet peeve of mine in that respect, however, so far has been German railway company Deutsche Bahn AG and ...

August 2, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship, Software

The Mother of All Leaky Abstractions: The 500-mile Email

In last week's musings I complained about leaky abstraction on two counts, which reminded me of what in my opinion must be the mother of all leaky abstractions: The notorious 500-mile email. Impedance mismatches and TCP connections seeping through the cracks of the latest reactive programming frameworks certainly at times are difficult to deal with but the actual underlying transmission protocol of the relativistic universe shining through when trying to send an email? It can't get any better than that ...

July 26, 2020 by Bjoern in Software

Musings of a Greybeard on the State of Software Engineering

Two days ago software engineer and fellow blogger Tom Hombergs asked on Twitter if software development had grown harder over recent years, to which I replied: "Incoherent ramblings of a greybeard (without a beard, which is weird; these words rhyme, which is even weirder ...), who has seen at least 3 fat-client-thin-client cycles (the standard time unit in software architecture): As usual it depends. Just a few examples:" For the purpose of this blog post I just deemed it more sophisticated to call ...

July 19, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.