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.

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 ...

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

Test-driven Development (TDD) with Angular 2 / 4

Recently, together with Jan Massenberg of Setlog I gave a talk on test-driven development (TDD) with Angular at the 2nd Angular Ruhr meetup. Currently, I help Setlog with improving their software quality and in particular with developing a SaaS tool that simplifies quality assurance processes (QA) in supply chain management. The talk was about hands-on experience with using TDD for implementing this SaaS tool.

Sunday October 22nd, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software

Agile Med Dev: Software Testing for Medical Devices

Medical devices software engineer Julien Zaegel wrote an interesting series of articles on medical devices software testing. These articles provide an overview of as well as several useful insights on the specifics of testing medical devices software and software in general. When it comes to automated and manual software testing for medical devices there are several aspects you don't usually have to deal with when testing more common kinds of web or business applications: With medical systems human lives are at stake. Medical devices ...

Sunday October 15th, 2017 by Bjoern in Business, Enterprise Software, Software

Front-end / back-end isn’t a useful distinction

Answering a Hacker News Ask HN titled "Why companies look for “full stack” developers instead of specialists?" I wrote this: Front-end / back-end isn't a particularly useful distinction in my opinion. Differentiating between those 2 is just another way of creating information silos. I'm old enough to have experienced at least 2 full thin-client-fat-client cycles and I'm certain the current one won't be the last (at least it seems to have been a recurring pattern since the beginning of modern computer science). While ...

Sunday October 8th, 2017 by Bjoern in Business, Software

Iconic and Feather: 2 Icon Sets Designed for the Web

With icon fonts such as Font Awesome, Material Design Icons and Glyphicons there's certainly no shortage of icons for use in web applications. Iconic and Feather are 2 alternatives to these widely-used icon collections. The latter is available for free under the MIT licence (a donation will be very much appreciated, though) while the former can be purchased for $129 ($39 for just the Webfont without SVGs) for a single app licence. Both are framework-agnostic and Iconic in particular has been designed from ...

Sunday October 1st, 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web, Web Applications

JHipster: Generate And Bootstrap CRUD Apps With Spring Boot And Angular

The previous two posts in my series on helpful tools for developing CRUD applications were about tools that addressed very specific problem areas: API format specifications and code generation from those specifications in particular. This post will be both less about APIs and solving specific CRUD-related problems but about a tool that deals with CRUD app requirements in a comprehensive manner. This tool I'm talking about is called - not so slightly tongue-in-cheek - JHipster. Both inspired by tried-and-true frameworks like Ruby on ...

Sunday September 17th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Swagger: A Roundtrip Tool For Creating And Consuming REST APIs

In this second part of my series on useful tools for developing CRUD applications I'd like to introduce Swagger and Swagger Codegen in particular. Introduce perhaps isn't exactly the right word because first of all Swagger is quite well known in developer circles these days. Secondly, a few months ago I wrote a blog post about how to use Swagger to generate client SDKs for REST APIs. Swagger - originally having originated at Wordnik is a tool for documenting and publishing their ...

Sunday September 10th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Annotate and validate data structures with JSON Schema

I'd like to begin my little series of useful tools for developing CRUD applications with JSON Schema: "JSON Schema is a vocabulary that allows you to annotate and validate JSON documents." JSON Schema gives you a straightforward way to provide type information and validation to existing data structures. Say, for example you have a product instance like this (converted from your language's native object or general data structure format using a tool like Jackson for Java): [code lang="js"] { "id": 1, ...

Sunday September 3rd, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Why Do We Still Write CRUD Applications?

Probably every software developer - since the 1990s at least - has been there once, asking him- or herself: "Why do I have to write tedious, repetitive CRUD code time and time again?" Being good, virtuous programmers some of those developers did what software development in the end mostly is about: They tried to automate a cumbersome, repetitive process that like any repetitive process should be performed by machines rather than humans. Some have succeeded - to some degree at least - ...

Sunday August 27th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.