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.

I see numbers

Metaphors play a vital role in how human beings make sense of the world. The ways in which we view and describe both the world around us and abstract thoughts often are inherently metaphorical. When relating to time, for example, we often use spatial metaphors such as "to look forward to", "time moving forward", or "to turn back time". For some though, relating to time in terms of spatial concepts and relations can take on quite a literal meaning. I've always visualised numbers, ...

January 2, 2022 by Bjoern in Design, General

Guest Post on the AWS Open Source Blog: Using PostgreSQL with Spring Boot on AWS

Last week, another two-part article by Tom Hombergs, Philip Riecks, and me was published on the AWS Open Source Blog. Thanks a lot to Ricardo Sueiras for making this possible. This time around we wrote about how to use a PostgreSQL database with Amazon RDS and Spring Boot: Using PostgreSQL with Spring Boot on AWS — Part 1 Using PostgreSQL with Spring Boot on AWS — Part 2 These articles draw upon the chapter Connecting to a Database with Amazon RDS from our eBook Stratospheric ...

October 3, 2021 by Bjoern in General

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 ...

July 4, 2021 by Bjoern in General

CloudMapper: An AWS Visualisation Tool

CloudMapper is an AWS visualisation tool that's highly useful for getting an overview of your AWS infrastructure and network setup. Depending on the number of services, instances, VPCs, and subnets used, getting lost is quite easy, especially when considering that out-of-the-box with AWS there's no single unified console from which to get an overview of your deployed resources but rather a multitude of consoles, one for each AWS service. Therefore, keeping track of your infrastructure and keeping your costs in check can be ...

March 21, 2021 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, General, Software, Web Applications

Year 1

March 7, 2021 by Bjoern in General

2020 in Review

May you live in interesting times. - claimed to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse - Usually I refrain from writing one of those end-of-the-year reviews because they often amount to little more than self-involved navel-gazing (been there, done that ...). However, 2020 was a truly interesting, extraordinary and in many ways remarkable year. So, here goes, navel-gazing and all ... In December 2019 (or thereabouts) what we today know as COVID-19 or the Coronavirus pandemic started to spread causing a global crisis ...

December 20, 2020 by Bjoern in Business, General

Emergency Remote – A Guide to “Winning” Remote Work

These days, there's certainly no shortage of remote work guides, how-tos and tools - and rightfully so: Remote work has made sense since before 2020 and in the future it'll be the new default for many industries. Emergency Remote is another more recent take on how to quickly implement a productive remote work environment that focuses on actionable measures with immediate benefits and using the changes required as an opportunity for improving your company's overall processes and work environment: Emergency Remote is for ...

August 9, 2020 by Bjoern in General

Repost from 16 June 2020: COVID-19 Tracing App for Germany

Repost from 16 June 2020: German COVID-19 tracing app available now.

June 28, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, General, Mobile Applications, Software

German COVID-19 Tracing App Available Now

Earlier today, the highly anticipated COVID-19 tracing app for Germany, called Corona-Warn-App, has been released. The iOS version is available on the App Store. The Android version can be downloaded at Google Play. The Corona-Warn-App is based on the DP3T (Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing) architecture and the joint specification by Apple and Google for privacy-preserving exposure notification, which implements this architecture as an API for official public health providers to draw upon. The app is developed and published as open source under the Apache ...

June 16, 2020 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, General, Mobile Applications, Software

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.