my blog. for you.

Reden wir über Digitales.

Ich bin selbständiger IT Berater und Unternehmer in der Internet und Software Branche. Ich beschäftige mich mit Design, Enterprise Applikationen, Web Apps und SaaS Produkten. Ich entwerfe und entwickle Business Lösungen und Anwendungen. Ich helfe Unternehmen in Sachen Software Qualität und Wissenstransfer, z.B. mit Angular und Spring Boot.

Testing REST Services with REST Assured

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.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 ...

The Art of the README

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.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 ...

23. April 2017 by Bjoern in Software

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

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.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 ...

16. April 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Clear Acceptance Criteria: The Key to Good Software Quality Right from the Start

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.Actually it should come as no surprise that clear acceptance criteria are a quintessential prerequisite for high quality software that meets both design requirements and customer demand. All too often however, acceptance criteria for software products are either non-existent or vague and ambiguous at best. Who hasn't come across 'acceptance criteria' such as "The app should have a modern UI." or "The application should be easy to use."? What do bromides like that amount to? ...

9. April 2017 by Bjoern in Software

Design Patterns: Event Sourcing and Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.Event Sourcing and Command and Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) are system design patterns that allow you to deal with event streams in a consistent manner. Common line-of-business applications typically are built using the MVC design pattern with the database tables representing the model tier in MVC as the single source of truth for the application state. Event-based systems are different - and inherently more complex - in that their single source of truth is the stream ...

2. April 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

‘Agile’ isn’t a new way of doing software development, it’s the normal way

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.Recently, during a conversation on software development "methodologies" (just the word "methodology" makes me cringe because it's a needlessly convoluted and complicated notion) one of the participants said something along the lines of "'Agile' isn't for everyone. Most people just aren't cut out for doing software development that way.". I strongly contest that notion. 'Agile' has become some bullshit bingo term that's slung around in order to perpetuate precisely those misconceptions the Agile Manifesto intended ...

26. März 2017 by Bjoern in Business, Software

Dan Bricklin – Inventor of the Electronic Spreadsheet

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.Today startup entrepreneurs are celebrated for disrupting industries and changing the world. Marc Andreessen is famously quoted with the statement "Software is eating the world!". Back in the days when software was nothing but a nascent industry, Dan Bricklin both changed the world with software, disrupted not one industry but several at the same time and in fact almost single-handedly created the industry of small business software. His name nowadays isn't exactly well known as ...

19. März 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Software

Keeping database schemas up-to-date with Flyway

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.At least ever since Ruby on Rails' Active Record Migrations put an emphasis on keeping database schemas consistent with your software's source code both during development and in production database migration tools have become a staple in modern software development. Database migration (or database refactoring as this technique is sometimes called as well) tools allow you to apply data definition language (DDL) statements like "CREATE TABLE ..." or "ALTER ..." to databases in an automated, ...

12. März 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Learning React Native Through Responsiveness and Instant Feedback

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.React Native Express is an interactive guide that enables you to learn React Native right in the browser. Getting started with React Native - and React for that matter - can be quite daunting. While the framework itself isn't all that difficult to grasp there are quite a few tools like transpilers such as Babel and state management libraries like Redux which are required for getting productive with React Native. React Native Express attempts to ...

5. März 2017 by Bjoern in Front End Entwicklung, Software, Web Applikation

Design & Quantum Superposition

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf English verfügbar.Last year, Hungarian designer Csongor Bartus published a thought-provoking article I've only recently come across. Quantum mechanics and design are two words you don't often see juxtaposed and probably rightfully so. No, I've not gone crazy and I'm not going to go down some weird esoteric "Quantum Design" rabbit hole here. However, Csongor borrows the term superposition from quantum mechanics as a metaphor for an interesting new angle on design for the web: To cut in, ...

26. Februar 2017 by Bjoern in Design, Software, Web, Web Applikation

Björn Wilmsmann

my blog. for you.

Reden wir über Digitales.