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.

Using SQLite on a Static Website Without a Back-end Server

GitHub user phiresky recently published an interesting blog post on Hosting SQLite databases on Github Pages. Using SQLite - or in fact any kind of SQL database - in the browser? Why should one want to do this? Now, while it's certainly true that in the context of web applications SQL databases and RDBMS generally are relegated to the realm of back-end servers, depending on the requirements, a database in a front-end application or a self-contained application that doesn't even have or ...

Hexagonal Architectures: @Column(nullable = false) vs @NotNull in Java Applications

Recently, I came across a small and common, but all the more interesting, hands-on example of why a hexagonal architecture can help with making both the architecture and the code of an application more understandable, approachable, and maintainable. I won't be going into any details about the concept of and ideas behind hexagonal architecture here. The gist is summarised quite nicely in this quote from Tom Homberg's article on Hexagonal Architecture with Java and Spring: The main feature of “Hexagonal Architecture”, as opposed ...

September 5, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

A few random thoughts on the development of software development in recent years

Last year, I replied to Tom's question "Has software development grown harder over the last years or have I just grown sluggish?" on Twitter with these incoherent ramblings of a greybeard, who has seen at least 3 fat-client-thin-client cycles: As usual it depends. Just a few examples: Spring Webflux and the "Everything has to be reactive even if the requirements don't demand it." fad is a bane. Just recently, I've been helping a client with getting Spring 5's WebClient to work with a ...

August 29, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Excalidraw: Shapes for UML & ER Diagrams

Excalidraw is a fairly new (having started in January 2020) virtual whiteboard software for creating diagrams with a hand-drawn aspect. I really like the aesthetics of diagrams created with Excalidraw. They have a natural feel and elegance to them. However, when recently revising some of the diagrams for Stratospheric – From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS I found Excalidraw to be lacking shapes for UML & ER diagrams. I know, not everyone is fond of those, but if you keep ...

August 22, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Stratospheric – In Orbit Now: Content-complete Version 1.0

Last week, we released version 1.0 of our eBook "Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS"! We hope you like this now content-complete release version of Stratospheric. Thanks to everyone who showed their trust in this project during its early stages! Here are some key facts about this project and the application we built as part of the book: 445 pages eBook with practical hands-on advice for running production-ready Spring Boot applications on AWS three main modules: "Deploying with AWS", "Spring ...

August 8, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

A Catalogue of Design Patterns

Recently, I came across this well-structured as well as visually appealing catalogue of software design patterns on Refactoring.Guru. The subject of design patterns can be a somewhat dry, unwieldy one. Hence, using visuals and metaphors can come in handy when explaining both the general idea behind design patterns and specific patterns alongside with their use cases. Refactoring.Guru does a great job not only at explaining the origin and purpose of and rationale behind design patterns and pattern languages but also at describing each ...

August 1, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

User Experience Design Methods & Deliverables

As I previously wrote about, design and user experience (UX) design are disciplines defined and governed by rules, principles, and constraints. The highly recommended Laws of UX provides an in-depth overview of principles and best practices in UX design. Coming from a slightly more hands-on perspective, designer Fabricio Teixeira compiled a comprehensive list of UX design methods & deliverables such as service blueprints, personas, or user journeys.

July 25, 2021 by Bjoern in Design

Towards More Considerate and More Collaborative Code Reviews

Software engineer Dan Goslen recently published an article on how he's going to change his approach to code reviews. The most widely used organizational pattern for conducting code reviews probably is the pull request, also called merge request. This particular pattern and the tools source code management systems provides us with to support this pattern lend themselves to a review strategy that focuses on commenting on code and minute details rather than the big picture and collaboration and knowledge sharing. The goal of ...

July 18, 2021 by Bjoern in Software

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