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.

Optimising Docker Image Sizes: “Self-extracting” Node.js Applications

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf Britisches Englisch verfügbar.As a follow-up on last week's article on tools for inspecting Docker images, and Docker image sizes in particular, today I'd like to introduce another - more custom - approach for reducing the size of Docker images for production deployments. As a means of shaving off an additional 50 MB from the packaged application in question I came up with an idea somewhat reminiscent of the self-extracting archives of yore (of the WinRAR and ... Read more

Tools for Inspecting Docker Images

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf Britisches Englisch verfügbar.Recently, I needed to inspect a Docker image in order to optimize its size for distribution and deployment on an ARM-based industrial microcontroller with rather tight bandwidth constraints. Once deployed at customer sites, these controllers typically don't have an Internet connection but still need to be updated occasionally, via the local network in that case. Since there's no guaranteed minimum network speed in this type of environment, yet software updates still have to complete ... Read more

Kent Beck’s Novel Approach to Software Quality: test && commit || revert

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf Britisches Englisch verfügbar.In a Hanselminutes episode from December last year I heard preeminent programmer and agile advocate Kent Beck talk about his intriguing approach to creating working, high-quality code. In line with the steps this approach involves he calls it test && commit || revert. In lieu of the TDD circle of life (write test - test fails - write code - test passes - refactor - test fails ...) test && commit || revert has ... Read more

Designing Delivery and Moving Beyond Products

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf Britisches Englisch verfügbar.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 ... Read more

Varying Degrees Of Software Quality And What To Do About It

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf Britisches Englisch verfügbar.When working on client projects I come across copious amounts of source code, which sometimes is very well-maintained, sometimes less so. The various code bases are as diverse as their owners and respective stakeholders: A few come with an inherent sense of quality, lots of unit tests serving as the specification for the product. They're typically delightful to maintain and extend. Some though at times leave the impression of having been cobbled together in a ... Read more

Advice On Improving JavaScript Test Speed (by Shyp Engineering)

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf Britisches Englisch verfügbar.On their blog engineers of logistics service Shyp (defunct) talk about how they improved the turn-around times of their JavaScript test suite by an order of magnitude of 3 (i.e. 1000x), which is no small achievement. In a modern software development process continuous integration and continuous deployment play a vital role. These ensure that your software always is in an deliverable, tested state and ideally is deployed to production systems in a timely manner ... Read more

Being the build guy

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf Britisches Englisch verfügbar.Being the build guy, i.e being the one who is responsible for a smooth build and deployment process on a software project is a role that's usually disliked by developers: It means a lot of system administration rather than coding. If something breaks and development grinds to a halt the burden of getting the project on the road again usually is on the person who manages the continuous integration server. However, I think being ... Read more

Continous Integration with Circle or: Coming Full Circle

Leider ist der Eintrag nur auf Britisches Englisch verfügbar.I've recently tried out Circle, a hosted continuous integration service, and I'm quite thrilled about it. Registration / login works via GitHub. Once logged in, Circle lets you choose a GitHub repository and starts the first build right away. Circle claims that setup is as easy as: Sign up to Circle, Give Circle permission to access GitHub on your behalf, Click on a project repository From my experience so far this claim is absolutely correct. Configuration is completely ... Read more