Björn Wilmsmann Blog | Björn Wilmsmann

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.

Aarron Walter – Returning to Your Maker Roots @ beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2022

To me - with many of the speakers (Geri Coady, Jude Pullen, Cabeza Patata, among others) talking about change and experiments - Aarron Walter's idea of reconsidering (which inspired the Re:considering podcast co-hosted by Aarron) what's truly important to you has been the overarching theme of this year's beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf:

Manuel Matuzovic – Lost in Translation @ beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2022

At beyond tellerrand Düsseldorf 2022 frontend developer and accessibility expert Manuel Matuzović gave this insightful - and genuinely funny - talk on web accessibility and in particular on how information often gets lost when web developers focus almost exclusively - to the exclusion of semantics and a design's intent - on the visual aspects while translating requirements into HTML and CSS:

May 15, 2022 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web Applications

New Java Features From Java 8 to Java 17: A Comprehensive Overview (Including Examples)

This useful article on Java Features from Java 8 to Java 17 (published on Reflectoring) provides a comprehensive overview of Java language features for each of the major Java versions that have ben released since 2014. Such a list comes in handy not only when dealing with different Java versions for different applications or projects but, especially due to the examples provided, can also serve as a conducive starting point for (re-)familiarising oneself with the features added to the core language with ...

May 1, 2022 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Self-Publishing a Book With (Almost) Complete Strangers: A Recap of Our Writing Process for Stratospheric

This week, Philip Riecks - one of the co-authors with whom I wrote Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS - published this article about our writing process for that ebook on his new blog about subjects such as freelancing, motivation, indie hacking, or productivity: Self-Publishing a Book With (Almost) Complete Strangers This highly detailed documentation of our writing process not only describes how we went about writing, publishing, and marketing Stratospheric but also gives a slew of suggestions, ...

April 24, 2022 by Bjoern in Business, Entrepreneurship, Software

7 Practical Design Tips

Some time ago, Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger of Tailwind CSS and Refactoring UI published this article with "7 Practical Tips for Cheating at Design". While I don't think that you can actually cheat at design, design being a skill that can and has to be learned, practiced, and honed like any other, pragmatic advice such as using colour and font weight for creating information hierarchy can help with achieving some quick wins and reaping the low-hanging fruit when it comes to ...

April 10, 2022 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications

Stratospheric – 1.6 Released: AWS CDK Bootstrapping 🏗

This week, we released version 1.6 of Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS. The main reason behind this release is that we somehow entirely missed talking about an important topic: Bootstrapping an AWS environment for the AWS CDK. You may have already run into this issue when trying to deploy one of our AWS CDK stacks: Has the environment been bootstrapped? Please run 'cdk bootstrap' We've now added a dedicated section on the AWS environment bootstrapping and explained the why ...

April 3, 2022 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Spring Framework RCE Vulnerability With War File Deployments on Tomcat

Yesterday, an RCE vulnerability in the Spring Framework has been announced: Spring Framework RCE, Early Announcement CVE-2022-22965: Spring Framework RCE via Data Binding on JDK 9+ While, as of now, only WAR deployments of Spring Boot applications running under Apache Tomcat seem to be affected, it is still recommended to upgrade to Spring Boot 2.6.6 as soon as possible, even for Spring-based applications deployed as a JAR, because "the vulnerability is more general, and there may be other ways to exploit it that have ...

April 1, 2022 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Christopher Alexander – Patterns in Architecture

Sadly, a few days ago, seminal architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander passed away. Having coined the term "pattern language" Christopher Alexander is considered the father of the pattern language movement. It is this term we as software engineers - oftentimes quite casually - refer to when we're talking about design patterns. In 1996, Christopher Alexander gave this compelling talk at the 1996 ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA): In this talk, Alexander addresses the connection between architecture and software ...

March 27, 2022 by Bjoern in Software

Performing Effective Code Reviews – A Checklist

A few years ago, software architect Surender Reddy Gutha compiled a - still quite relevant - Code Review Checklist. All too often, when performing code reviews, we as software engineers tend to focus on minute details such as code formatting rather than the big picture, non-functional requirements, or architecture and security considerations. Perhaps, the problem already originates with the term code review: Rather than reviewing code we are - or should be - reviewing the resulting software and the impact code changes ...

March 20, 2022 by Bjoern in Software

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