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.

Phil Hawksworth @ beyond tellerrand 2017: Dodging Bullets – Microservices for Fewer Sleepless Nights

Phil Hawksworth @ beyond tellerrand 2017: Dodging bullets – Microservices for fewer sleepless nights from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.

Sunday June 18th, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web

Chris Heilmann @ beyond tellerrand 2017: Breaking out of the Tretris Mindset

Chris Heilmann @ beyond tellerrand 2017: Breaking out of the Tetris mind set from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.

Sunday June 11th, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Nadieh Bremer @ beyond tellerrand 2017: Hacking the Visual Norm

Nadieh Bremer @ beyond tellerrand 2017: Hacking the Visual Norm from beyond tellerrand on Vimeo.

Sunday June 4th, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Web

Designing Delivery and Moving Beyond Products

I'm a frequent attendee at Lean DUS, a regular event organised by the fantastic folks of sipgate. At LEAN DUS #23 earlier this year Jeff Sussna gave a talk on moving beyond products and unifying design and operations. Jeff runs a consulting company called Sussna Associates, which aims to help businesses to establish a comprehensive, continuous service delivery process. He also condensed his expertise in a book called Designing Delivery, which outlines a continuous value creation process involving design thinking, agile software development ...

Sunday May 28th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Using Swagger to Generate Client SDKs for REST APIs

These days Swagger is a popular, easy-to-use tool for (semi-)automatically documenting REST APIs on-the-fly. For example, in order to document a REST API created with Spring Boot and Jersey literally all you have to do is add these two entries to your Maven pom.xml: [xml] <dependency> <groupid>io.springfox</groupid> <artifactid>springfox-swagger2</artifactid> <version>2.6.1</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupid>io.springfox</groupid> <artifactid>springfox-swagger-ui</artifactid> <version>2.6.1</version> </dependency> [/xml] You'll then get a ready-made documentation for all your REST API endpoints. An example of how this looks like can be seen here. While this already is very useful in that it helps with properly documenting your software, especially ...

Sunday May 21st, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software

Should Web Apps Behave More Like UNIX Programs?

Recently, through various discussions about the nature of the web and web applications I came up with an intriguing (to me at least ...) idea: Web apps should behave like UNIX command-line tools. Please hear me out and let me elaborate. Probably the most widespread pattern in modern web app development is that of single-page applications (SPAs). Though that particular term isn't used as abundantly anymore as it used to be a few years ago the design pattern it promoted still persists: Web apps ...

Sunday May 14th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Mobile Applications, Software, Web, Web Applications

Codrops – Web design inspiration

Codrops is a blog that shares web design inspiration, trends and techniques. These days when thinking about your next web application's design it can be quite tempting to think "Ah, I'll just use Bootstrap and be done with that.". Although frameworks such a Bootstrap certainly aren't a bad start as they provide web apps with a common ground and predictable UI components - a minimum design standard if you will - they are just that: A start. In order to really help ...

Sunday May 7th, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Web Applications

Testing REST Services with REST Assured

RESTful service testing can be unwieldy and difficult to get started with. Providing a REST API implies using a variety of technologies and techniques such as HTTP, JSON, authentication, various payload transfer mechanisms and content types. This is where a tool that abstracts over these technical details and facilitates their application comes in handy. REST Assured is a high-level DSL for testing REST APIs. It draws upon behaviour-driven development (BDD) and hence makes for readable test descriptions. A typical acceptance test with ...

Sunday April 30th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

The Art of the README

Just recently I was reminded about an obvious and vital but all too often neglected aspect of good quality software: Creating and maintaining a README file to both onboard new developers and to get users started with your software easily. While certainly essential in the context of open source software maintaining a high quality README is also relevant regarding proprietary / company-internal software that's limited to only a select circle of developers and users: It enables both your customers and internal users ...

Sunday April 23rd, 2017 by Bjoern in Software

What Causes Over-engineering and How Can You Prevent It?

Last year software engineer Fagner Brack wrote an interesting and thoughtful article on "How To Accept Over-Engineering For What It Really Is" The article is very much worth the read in its entirety. There are a few key takeaways though I derived from it personally: I like the definition of over-engineering (quoted from Jeff Sternal) as "Code that solves problems you don’t have.". Fagner's conclusion is that what constitutes over-engineering depends on both context and the people involved. Over-engineering is usually brought about by unclear ...

Sunday April 16th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.