Software | 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

Sara Harkousse @ RuhrJS 2017 – Web Components: It’s all rainbows and unicorns! Is it?