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.

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 ...

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 ...

Sunday August 8th, 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 ...

Sunday August 1st, 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.

Sunday July 25th, 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 ...

Sunday July 18th, 2021 by Bjoern in Software

A Collection of for a Improving the UX of Signup and Login Workflows

Independent UX designer Erik D. Kennedy recently published an article with 15 Tips for Better Signup / Login UX on Learn UI Design - a website through which he provides acclaimed courses on both UI and UX design. The article lists general suggestions such as autofocusing on the first field (i.e. the username, or rather: email, field), immediately validating form values, or making input labels clickable, as well as more specific - but no less expedient - ones like making password requirements explicit to ...

Sunday July 11th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Opinion-driven Design: Simplicity Over Flexibility

Software developer Brent Roose recently wrote a blog post on what he calls "opinion-driven design". His point his that while a mindset of "high configurability and flexibility" is undoubtedly common when it comes to the development of software frameworks and libraries, it ultimately is also misguided in most cases. In an attempt to both accommodate every possible use case and to remain in control (also known as the "Not invented here" (NIH) syndrome), framework developers tend to favour flexibility at the expense of ...

Sunday July 4th, 2021 by Bjoern in General

Second-order Affordances: Design & Quantum Superposition

A few years ago, having read a thought-provoking article by Csongor Bartus I wrote about design & quantum superposition. The main idea behind this article, and my interpretation, is that - similar to a particle, which exists in a state of quantum superposition - a design doesn't exist by itself but can only ever be realised in a given context and at a specific moment through observation by a user and possibly a device that design is observed with. The gist, ...

Sunday June 27th, 2021 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web, Web Applications

A Concise Overview of Java’s Instant, LocalDateTime, ZonedDateTime and When to Use Which

The authoritative answer to a question on Stack Overflow on the difference between Instant and LocalDateTime covers various classes from the Java 8 Date/Time API and how those are actually meant to be used. Names such as LocalDateTime can be misleading in that they suggest a specific locale or locality rather than any locality (as that name is intended). This, in turn, can give rise to problems with inaccurate date and time values if timezones or even just daylight saving time have ...

Sunday June 20th, 2021 by Bjoern in Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.