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.

Opinionated List of Essential WordPress Plugins

I have an personal, opinionated list of essential plugins that should be installed in every new WordPress instance for various purposes, a few of which are: security maintenance performance search engine optimisation (SEO) legal compliance So, without further ado here's my list of essential WordPress plugins: Advanced Automatic Updates Akismet Anti-Spam All In One SEO Pack Autoptimize BackWPup EU Cookie Law Google Authenticator Google XML Sitemaps Leverage Browser Caching Limit Login Attempts Social Media Auto Publish Wordfence Security WP Super Cache
Sunday December 31st, 2017 by Bjoern in Business, Software, Web
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Rachel Andrew @ RuhrJS 2017: Start Using CSS Grid Layout Today

As the obligatory CSS person at a JavaScript conference, at RuhrJS 2017 CSS expert Rachel Andrew gave a talk on CSS grid layouts and how they differ from flexbox layouts:
Sunday December 17th, 2017 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications
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Sara Harkousse @ RuhrJS 2017 – Web Components: It’s all rainbows and unicorns! Is it?

At RuhrJS 2017 Sara Harkousse gave a talk on web components and custom elements in particular. In this talk she gives a hands-on introduction on how to get started with custom elements:
Sunday December 10th, 2017 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Software, Web Applications
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Paying for Developer Tools

Recently, a user named amerkhalid wrote this on Hacker News (commenting on a question about the market for developer tools): Agreed. Developers are hard bunch to sell to. We go out of our way to find free tools and almost look down on people who use decent IDEs or other tools. One example, when I finally got legit license for Sublime Text, all of my friends made fun of me for paying for a free software. I replied by criticising this attitude (that ...
Sunday December 3rd, 2017 by Bjoern in Business, Software
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12 Factors for Building Quality Web Applications

When considering the different aspects that potentially contribute to (or detract from, mark you ...) quality, reliability and maintainability of a web application I always like to come back to the Twelve-Factor App. Originally created by Adam Wiggins in 2011 the Twelve-Factor App is a highly useful design framework for both creating new web apps and measuring and improving the quality of existing applications. This framework allows you to create and maintain long-term viable applications that make use of declarative formats, clearly ...
Sunday November 26th, 2017 by Bjoern in Software, Web Applications
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Microservices and Decoupling Front-end Components

Microservices have become a common design pattern for splitting up and modularising monolithic applications. The indiscriminate application of this particular design pattern is quite a bit worrying, though. A few months ago I gave this answer to the question what the biggest struggle with Microservices is: Convincing people that microservices are not a cure-all but just another design pattern. You have to start out with a monolith and only if you realise along the way that some components might work better as a ...
Sunday November 19th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications
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Web Apps and Websites: Documents and Applications

Today, when starting development of a new website using a pattern that just a few years ago used to be called single-page application (SPA) not only seems to be the new default but even like the only way of creating stuff for the web. Clearly though not all content for the web is created equal: On one side of the spectrum we have (mostly) static documents identified by URIs and returned by URLs. Most websites that simply provide content (news sites for ...
Sunday November 12th, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web Applications
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William Hertling on AI Risks

William Hertling, author of the Singularity Series books and the recent techno-crime thriller Kill Process earlier this year shared a few of his thoughts regarding artificial (general) intelligence (AI / AGI) and the hazards as well as ethical ramifications and quandaries that the emergence of AI / AGI might give rise to. In Ten Musings on AI Risks William broaches both pragmatic subjects such as risk mitigation and deeper moral questions. In his (and my ...) opinion rather than artificially slowing down ...
Sunday November 5th, 2017 by Bjoern in Ideas, Software
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More on JSON and REST API Specifications

Expanding on my previous posts about annotating and validating JSON data structure with JSON Schema defining and documenting REST APIs using Swagger I have two additional suggestions for tools that help you define and build HTTP-based APIs in a less haphazard, more deliberate manner: JSON API: While JSON Schema allows you to annotate and validate JSON-based data types JSON API gives you clear, opinionated guidelines for structuring JSON API responses so you don't have think about those implementation details yourself. Having uniform guidelines for API ...
Sunday October 29th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications
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